My Mother Was 65. She Did Not Have to Go That Way.

This is the essay I have been building toward since the first day I started working on this brand. It is about my mother, Teri. About who she was, how she lived, and what the healthcare system never gave her. And about why everything I have built exists because of what I learned watching her.

By Christine Costello  |  12 min read  |  Mindset & Identity

Her name was Teri. And she was the kind of person who made you feel, every time you were in the room with her, that whatever you had to say was the most important thing she had heard all day.

She raised seven children. She wore polyester pants in the eighties when cotton was fashionable, not because she did not know the difference, but because new clothes for herself came after everything else, and everything else was a long list that started with us. She played the piano. She had a beautiful voice. She loved crossword puzzles and the Hallmark channel and board games and genealogy and, above everything else, the particular kind of joy that came from having her whole family in one room.

She had a laugh I loved. She would dance without caring what anyone thought. She made friends everywhere she went, and I do not mean that in the vague way people say it at funerals. I mean that when I was notifying people of her passing, I discovered she had personally touched the lives of most of my friends. People I thought were mine. She had gotten to them first.

She was my mother. And she was my friend. And she was gone at 65, during what should have been a routine medical procedure, in a body that had so little reserve left that it could not hold on when it needed to.

That last part is what I have spent the years since trying to understand. And what I understand now is this: it did not have to go that way.

A Body That Was Never Fully Supported

My mother was sick for most of her adult life. Chronic conditions that frustrated her doctors, left her in pain, and over the years accumulated into a physical fragility that none of us wanted to look at directly because she had pulled through so many times before. We had started to believe she was invincible. That was easier than accepting what we were watching.

What the healthcare system gave her was management. Medications for each condition. Adjustments when the side effects of one medication created a new problem requiring another. Explanations that framed her situation as the expected outcome of her diagnoses, with the clear implication that the best she could hope for was to keep things from getting worse. Nobody ever sat with her and asked what it would take to restore her vitality. Nobody built a framework for rebuilding her strength, addressing the lifestyle factors that I now believe were driving much of what she experienced, or looking at her medications as a system that might be compounding her decline rather than preventing it.

She was told, in various ways and by various people who meant well, that she would not feel young again. That the tradeoffs were the cost of her conditions. That decline was the reasonable expectation and her job was to navigate it with grace.

She did navigate it with grace. That was not the problem. The problem was that grace was the only tool she was given.

What I Did Not Know Then

I did not have the knowledge then that I have now. I was not yet a functional medicine coach. I had not yet spent years in the research on muscle as longevity medicine, on cellular energy decline, on the relationship between chronic inflammation and frailty, on what the body actually needs to maintain its physiological reserve as it ages. I could see that my mother was losing ground. I could not see the mechanisms clearly enough to know what to do about it.

What I know now is that much of what she experienced was not inevitable. It was the outcome of a set of conditions that were addressable, or at minimum improvable, if anyone had ever approached her health through a restorative lens rather than a management one. The muscle she lost over the years of chronic illness and reduced activity. The metabolic resilience that erodes when a body is not given adequate protein, adequate movement, and adequate cellular support. The physiological reserve that determines whether a body can handle the unexpected. These are not mysteries. They are known biological processes with known nutritional and lifestyle responses.

Nobody gave her that framework. That is not an accusation. It is just a fact, and it is the fact that built this brand.

Some of the most important health decisions happen long before a crisis. The reserve you build now is what determines how your body handles what comes later.

The Woman She Was

I want to spend a moment here that has nothing to do with health science, because I think it matters for you to know who she was beyond the context of her illness.

She was generous in a way that was almost reckless. If she had something you needed, it was yours. Her time, her attention, her last good piece of anything. I grew up watching her give and give and give without keeping score, and I thought that was just what mothers did. It took me a long time to understand that it was specifically what she did, and that not everyone had that.

She had an inner strength she never fully recognized in herself. She went through losses and hardships that would have flattened someone with less resilience, and she came out the other side still looking for the good in people. She prayed, often, in the quiet way of someone who genuinely believed it was a conversation rather than a performance. She had a moral compass that did not bend when it was inconvenient.

She was curious about people. She wanted to know your story. When you talked to her she made you feel heard in a way that is rarer than it should be. My ex-husband helped me really see this about her, helped me slow down and listen to what she had to say in her last years, and I am grateful every day that I did. I learned more about who she was as a person in those years than in all the years before them combined.

She watched my son the way she had watched all of us, with that same gentle patience, singing the same songs she had sung to me, showing up fully even when I could see the pain in her eyes from the physical effort it took. That is what she gave. Right up to the end.

I spent a good portion of my life wanting to be different from my mother. I understand now that I would be honored to be just like her.

What Watching Her Taught Me About This Work

There is a pattern I have seen over and over in my coaching work with women navigating midlife health. They are managing symptoms rather than rebuilding foundations. They are accepting a version of decline that has been normalized by the people caring for them. They are being told that what they are experiencing is the expected outcome of their age, their hormones, their history, with no road map for what restoration might actually look like.

Every time I sit with one of those women, I think about my mother. About the years she spent in a healthcare system that managed her conditions but never asked what her body needed to be strong. About the physical reserve she might have built if someone had approached her health that way earlier. About whether the outcome might have been different if she had been given the tools that I now understand exist and work.

I cannot change what happened to her. But I can change what happens to the people who find this brand and this work. That is not a marketing statement. It is why I get up and do this every day.

The functional medicine framework exists because normal lab ranges were never designed to identify optimal health. They were designed to identify disease. The gap between normal and optimal is where the people I work with live, and it is where my mother lived for decades without anyone helping her cross it.

The supplement formulas exist because the products available in the market were not built for a midlife body with declining cellular energy, rising anabolic resistance, and the specific nutritional needs that aging physiology creates. They were built for younger athletes or for general wellness, neither of which addresses what a body over 40 actually requires to maintain its strength and reserve.

The education in The Vitality Record exists because information is the first thing that was missing for my mother and for every client I have worked with who was doing everything she knew to do and still losing ground.

The Generation She Left Behind

My mother had seven children. She had grandchildren she adored. She had a circle of friends who felt genuinely loved by her. She was 65 years old, which is not old, and which felt far too young to everyone who knew her.

I am 56. I think about that number a lot. I think about the reserve I am building right now, deliberately, with everything I know about what a midlife body needs to stay strong and capable and resilient. I think about what it means to model a different kind of aging for my son, who is watching the same way I watched my mother, absorbing the narrative that this chapter of life either produces or does not.

The narrative I want him to absorb is not the one about graceful decline. It is the one about building. About muscle as health capital. About cellular health as something you tend to rather than something that happens to you. About the body at 60 and 70 being capable of more than the standard story says, if you give it what it actually needs.

That is the generational shift this brand is working toward. Not just for the people who use these products. For the story they carry forward and the example they set for the people watching them.

My mother gave everything she had to the people she loved. She did not give it to herself. I do not think she was ever truly shown how. This brand is my attempt to show the generation that comes after her, and the one after that, that there is another way. That the body you are in at 50 and 55 and 60 and beyond is capable of being strong, capable of building and rebuilding, capable of the kind of vitality that makes the years you have genuinely worth having.

She deserved that. You deserve that. And the people watching you deserve to see what it looks like when someone refuses to accept anything less.