Translating Love: The Story of Nelly & Hubert Janssen

Nelly and Hubert.
(Credit: Mary Beth Janssen)

“Death creates greater clarity,” says Mary Beth Janssen. We’re chatting over the phone before she takes her morning train into Chicago. It’s the start of yet another busy day for a woman whose passion for her work feels both inexhaustible and contagious.

Renowned for her work as an educator of mind-body health and organic beauty, Janssen received her training from Deepak Chopra, M.D., at the Chopra Center for Well-Being. She has six books under her belt, serves the Unity Wellness group and applies her wellness skills to everything from spa to hospice environments. Together with her dog, Hogan, she even forms a trained therapy dog team. It’s an impressive CV, but today we’re talking about something a bit more personal. Today, she’s telling me about the sixty-year love story of Hubert and Nelly, her parents. More specifically, we’re talking about the new life given to their story through her mother’s recent translation of their love letters — souvenirs from the couple’s courtship days in Holland. With her father having passed away a year and a half ago, their translation (from Dutch to English) became yet another way for her mother and her to reconnect with a part of their family’s past.

Mary Beth Janssen
(Credit: storey.com)

“I told her not to leave out any of the juicy parts!” says Janssen about asking her mother to translate the pile of love letters, “I’ve been reading them this week and they are so touching.”

“I told her not to leave out any of the juicy parts!”

— Mary Beth Janssen on her mother’s translation of her parents’ love letters

Janssen encouraged her mother to translate the letters, which Nelly found sorting through the objects of her home. This past Fourth of July, she had a heart attack followed by a stroke and chose to go home in lieu of going through with the open-heart surgery recommended by her surgeons. “In that regard she’s my heroine,” says Janssen, who knows the tools for wellness and self-care better than anyone, “I work in the senior lifestyle realm of things, and this discussion about end-of-life care and what that means, combined with seeing my mom make that decision — after seeing what my dad went through at the end of his life — was so powerful. Just to say no — no surgery for me, I’m going to just go home and enjoy every moment I have. I think it was a big deal for her to do the translation in and of itself. Her handwriting isn’t what it used to be, sure. But it’s still beautiful. She did a fantastic job, and handed me everything after a week when she came over for Sunday dinner!”

Credit: Mary Beth Janssen

“Dearest Nelly,

I am sitting here with tears in my pen, and am going to let the tears roll into words…”

— Hubert in a letter to Nelly

Janssen says Nelly even had to pull out her old Dutch dictionary to translate some of the words because they were words belonging to a language shared by her and Hubert, who moved to the States in 1953 after they were married. Now that he has died, she just doesn’t use it as much.

“I danced with Hubert,” recalls Nelly in an interview video that Janssen made with her parents. She continues on about the first time she met Hubert, his arm over her shoulder, “at the end of the night I got a kiss from him. And that was the end of the story because I thought what am I going to do with a farmer?” But get married they did, and they remained inseparable.

“It’s so amazing for me to see them together in this video,” says Janssen, “and so moving to read about their courtship in these letters.” Hubert and Nelly’s relationship can be traced across continents, even into a new century, but it’s their mutual devotion to one another, so quietly but strongly expressed in their letters, that burns the brightest.

If you wish to learn more about Mary Beth Janssen’s work check out the link in the beginning of the article as well as our founder’s review of Janssen’s book Pleasure Healing.