Remembering Isabella De La Houssaye ’86

Welcome to the PAW Memorials podcast, where we celebrate the lives of alumni. On this episode, PAW Memorials editor Nicholas DeVito sat down with Melissa Marks ’86 and Susan Jackson ’86 to discuss Isabella De La Houssaye ’86. She was a lawyer, mother, art curator, and endurance athlete. Isabella died Dec. 2, 2023. She was named a fellow to the Explorers Club

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TRANSCRIPT

Nicholas DeVito: Hello, I’m Nicholas DeVito, Class Notes and Memorials editor of Princeton Alumni Weekly. On this month’s Memorials PAWcast, we remember Isabella de la Houssaye from the class of 1986. Isabella was a lawyer, mother, art curator, and endurance athlete. She died December 2nd, 2023. I spoke with Susan Jackson and Melissa Marks, both from the class of 1986.

Hello. Today, we’re talking about Isabella Livaudais de la Houssaye from the class of 1986. And we’re talking with Melissa Marks and Sue Jackson.

Melissa and Sue, can you introduce yourselves please?

Susan Jackson: Sure, I can start. My name is Sue Jackson, Class of ’86, and I met Isabella the first day I arrived at Princeton because we were assigned to be roommates. And I am eternally grateful to the Princeton housing office for whatever dart-throwing or algorithm made them decide that a girl from Southwest Louisiana and a girl from Allentown, Pennsylvania, would be a perfect match because we were.

Melissa Marks: I’m Melissa Marks, and I’m Class of ’86. I met Isabella the first week of freshman year. And it wasn’t luck or fortune or serendipity. It was pure Isabella who came up to me and said she wanted to get to know me. She actually said something about my appearance at the time that was very complimentary, and it was something that typically a young woman doesn’t say to another young woman. And I thought this was incredible that she said this to me. And she said she really wanted to get to know me. And she thought that I ... It was the most forward and direct, incredible entry into a relationship, and that was the beginning of our relationship.

ND: That’s lovely. And so, that kind of leads me to ... You guys kind of covered it. Your first impressions of Isabella. She just seems that she was forward and outgoing in all the great ways. And tell me about ...

Melissa, you didn’t live with her the first year?

MM: No, I was not one of her roommates, no.

ND: But you were close friends, and then you all went through all four years together, and then you graduated.

Can you talk to me about just college life with Isabella?

SJ: Sure. I can take this next. Back on the rooming thing, our freshman year, there were four of us on our floor. We were the only freshmen. We were the only girls. Our RA group was below us. We don’t have to put this in the podcast, but they didn’t speak to us after the first two days. Or we didn’t speak to them, not sure which, but we became a unit. We lived together the next year, adding in a few more people, and various formations of us lived together all four years. The last year, it was just Isabella and I with adjoining singles, but we had signed in with a group of friends.

And from the very first, it was just ... With Isabella and I, we got along really well. And even though we were so different, we just got to know each other. And freshman fall, she took me home to Louisiana for fall break, which was very wild and very different.

I landed. She and her friend took me out two-stepping. I went on dates with people. Lots of dresses and fancy shoes. Drive-through hurricane bars. They had drive-through bars in New Orleans. It was wild.

And then later that fall, she came with me for Thanksgiving to my family. We went to this unheated farmhouse, or not very much heated, in Massachusetts. She was still talking, literally until shortly before she died, about how cold it had been on that Thanksgiving so many years before. And every Thanksgiving, we would write to each other and wish each other happy Thanksgiving. And she said, “I still remember how cold it was.” She was sitting up there working.

And I know I’m taking up a lot of the time, but she became known for her just doggedness. And she was an incredible endurance athlete. That wasn’t the case freshman year. But the seeds of that, that passion about doing things, about learning things, about knowing new people and mastering things was there from the first. And I never heard that story about how she met you, Isabella ... How Isabella met you, Melissa. But I 100% believe it because she did. She was like, “You look interesting. I want to-

Melissa Marks: Yeah.

Susan Jackson: She was constantly coming back, and she would come back at two in the morning, and she’d say, “Oh, I met the most interesting person, and we just were talking about this.” She always wanted to see what made people tick. And that continued through her whole life.

She had five kids. She had all kinds of crazy going on. She was sick for a long time. She always wanted to know how you were doing, see how she could help, how she could make life better, but she was always very fun and joyous at the same time. And that was so infectious.

MM: She would make a decision that she wanted to get to know this person, and she always had a collection of people. And I would think sometimes it was a motley crew. I was like, “I don’t know why I’m still included.” Over the course of our lives, different people would be added, and we were all very, very different from one another.

But back to college, I just wanted to say I really did not know how smart and how tenuous ... What’s the word that I’m looking for? I didn’t really imagine Isabella that she became because she was a partier. I had so much fun with her. Of course, the young men loved her, and she was a super flirt. Some people knew how to flirt, and some did not. She knew. And we would have so much fun at parties.

And then when we studied together, she would just pull an all-nighter. We would pull all-nighters and she’d have her Diet Coke or Tab. I’m not sure what we drank. And then these bags of candy. And we would study. And then we would suntan together outside on roofs with the tin foil. And it was just really fun. I was a partner with her in a class where we operated on rats and all sorts of things happened to our rats, and we would just laugh about them. But I didn’t see as well, Susan, as you did that the kind of person that she would become. I saw the seeds, but it was really just ... It was so much fun to be with Isabella.

SJ: Absolutely. And I didn’t see at the time, mind you, and the tanning reminded me when I went on that trip to Louisiana freshman fall, and her family had a pool, and I got in the pool and started swimming laps. And she was like, “Oh, laps.” She had never thought of swimming laps.

Now, mind you, I don’t know how much you’ve heard about Isabella, but she got really, really into swimming laps. Unbelievably so. And even when she was ... The poor thing. In her last months getting in the pool with her, and she tried to do 60 minutes a day, and she was in excruciating pain. She did triathlons in every state and possibly every continent. I don’t know if that was triathlons or just marathons.

Melissa Marks: Yes.

Susan Jackson: And when I do laps, I still do the same amount at the same speed that I did in college. And she totally leapfrogged over me.

But that’s her.

MM: Even at the end, she would be wearing a brace, anything to sort of keep her spine.

She is a tiny person, well, compared to me. And I used to have to wear flippers to keep up with her. That’s how you could be with Isabella. You spend a lot of time with her, so you exercise with her. You could walk with her, swim with her, run with her, bike with her. And I would wear flippers just to keep up. And we’d have our boards and talk the whole time. And you could just talk forever with her. And it was always about very, very real things. Very ... There’s no chit-chat. No small talk-

ND: She went deep.

MM: Right to the core. Right to the heart of who you were and who she was and who people were and what was happening in the world and what was happening in books and what was happening in movies.

ND: That’s amazing.

SJ: But always wanting to really know what was going on and really listening and drawing out, “Oh, what about this? You have this arcane annoying thing going on at work. Well, what about ... Have you tried this?” And also totally fun and laughing. I would say she didn’t have the same sense of humor that I did and a lot of our friends did, but always just really appreciating the funny stories and the crazy memories and the crazy current things going on. “And can you believe this happened?”

ND: Right. It sounds like she wanted real life, not surface level, which is that’s the mark of a true friend. That’s great.

You know her in college. After college, she heads off to Columbia to earn a law degree.

And how did you all keep in touch after that?

SJ: We overlapped in New York a little bit, and one of our friends, Katherine, who lived with us in college, lived with her for part of her time at Columbia. I think the first year she was in ... I think she was in France the first year after we graduated.

MM: Yes.

SJ: And, I mean, we would just keep in touch over the years. And then she met David. I know I was ... I met up ... I had been living in Japan, and I met up with her and her mom in Hong Kong and Beijing, and they were meeting up with David. I think he proposed to her later on that trip. I think her mom was still there then. But I know I have this very fun picture of us.

We rented bikes to go on the Great Wall, which was my last big biking adventure, I will say right now. This was in 1990. I didn’t do that part. Isabella was also bemused but tolerant of people who didn’t, say, want to get up at five in the morning and dash up from Lawrenceville and go swim in the Hudson River or bike to Pennsylvania and back.

Anyway, we just kept in touch over the years. I never lived with her again. She got married. She and David bought their house in Lawrenceville. I know you reconnected a lot at that point, Melissa, which I’m sure you’ll talk about. And then we were living all over the world but would always sort of meet up and see each other.

Who knows? But looking over all the pictures we put together for while she was very sick at the end, and it’s for the funeral. Lots of pictures from various meetups over the years. We were both in her wedding, which was in 1992, I want to say, which was in New Orleans, which was such a fun, crazy, big New Orleans event. And then we all went ... Her oldest son got married in New Orleans a couple of years ago, and we went to that as well. We were very honored to be invited to that.

That’s a very long answer. The short answer is we just kept in touch and kept getting together. And just one quick more thing on that. When Isabella got sick and the pandemic started, she used to come into Sloan Kettering in New York City for treatments a lot, and she didn’t want to take the subway or take a taxi. I used to walk ... I live in Manhattan. I would walk up to Penn Station, meet her, and we would walk over to Sloan Kettering, which is ... I don’t know how well you know New York City, but it’s-

ND: Uptown.

SJ: It’s 74th and York. We would just have these walks, and I could tell for the most part I was ... She would slow down for me. And-

MM: Wait, you walked to Penn Station, too, to meet her? You did that walk too?

SJ: I usually did-

MM: Oh, God.

SJ: ... because she also got me into this walking thing where we would do 20,000 steps a day. Kind of crazy. And then she and David both said, “20,000 steps. I guess, is that good for you? You should do other exercise instead.” But it was amazing having that time at the end to just be able to catch up on literally everything. And all the time I think of things I want to tell her. I will start to cry now. I started to cry yesterday just thinking of some things that are happening to me now and how pleased she would be to hear about it and also really wishing I could just ask her advice because she would be the perfect person to go to.

ND: How did she get involved in endurance athletics? Because it doesn’t seem like she was doing that in college, but as time went on, did she ... I have here that she climbed four out of the seven summits. She ran 100-plus marathons. She was named a fellow to the Explorers Club. She was a big deal in all that. And how did she get involved in that?

MM: I’m going to answer a little bit about that, and it sort of dovetails with just sort of saying how I continued to know her. After college and going to Columbia, she also was determined to get married and find the perfect man. And she did. And she had a life plan, and that was to have a job and get married and have lots of kids. And she achieved that plan very quickly.

I think I also got married pretty early out of college for the group. Maybe was one of the first. And then she got married and was one of the first of all of us to have a child and then continued to have children and very fairly one after the other. And she traveled with David for David’s work. Here’s this incredibly independent and ambitious and a woman now also taking on the role of wife and mother.

And I think she carved out this place for herself to achieve, to succeed, to be with herself, to care for her own soul, and it became just an enormous part of her life and how she defined herself. And it was separate. And it was hers. And it was magnificent. And I think that is what ... All the different parts of her fed each other. And this was a crucial, crucial part for her. And it just grew. I mean, she was just so good at it.

And it also strengthened her mothering. And it strengthened her ability to maintain a complicated marriage. All marriages are complicated. That’s how I saw it just become a necessity to her. It wasn’t about winning any of these things or fame or anything. It was just she absolutely every single day had to achieve a certain amount of physical work with her body, and her body became something superhuman, really.

SJ: Absolutely. And I would just add that your use of the word work ... It also dovetailed with her stopping working because it ... And again, this doesn’t have to be in the podcast, but it wasn’t really working for her to be having a corporate career and be a mom and be having David whose work required him to travel all the time. She stopped working at the ... I think by that point she was at Lehman.

And not at all without misgivings, but I think absolutely everything Melissa said and just adding that I think in some ways it kind of fulfilled the work portion of her. As we’ve said, she was always so dedicated and so wanting to personally achieve. And so, that became the area when the traditional work stopped in that way, although she definitely liked having adventures before that. But the really hardcore.

And travel, too. She just started ... She and David traveled a lot from the beginning, but she just got really into going to the craziest places, and you can see by all the things her children achieved and planting a gay pride flag on top of all seven summits, the tallest seven summits, et cetera. That was all ...

MM: And she could really fit it in and find a way into her every day, be it waking up very early in the morning, either a walk or a bike ride or a swim. And when they traveled, again, it was connected with some kind of physical activity. It was a way to make life work for the whole family.

And then she did have her Material Culture company and all kinds of millions of other projects. But again, they were not corporate. I mean, she could not be in the and have a similar career to her husband. I mean, we all know that’s almost impossible, and families don’t thrive in those situations. She found a way to continue with all of her aspirations and her dedication and her commitment and her fervent love of the physical world while doing everything else she needed to do for her family.

SJ: Yes, absolutely. Yes. And 100%. And Material Culture was actually this amazing synthesis of all these things she loved. And because it ... The world travel part and being able to travel to buy things and knowing about stuff and loving beauty. The initial part of her becoming an endurance athlete ... I think the seeds were in the ending the corporate job, but she was always incredibly involved in everything she touched.

ND: She also started a nonprofit, correct? Bike Breathe Believe?

SJ: Yes.

ND: And so, she was doing that and Material Culture?

MM: Yeah. I mean, they were two very, very different projects. Obviously, Material Culture, as Susan said, was where sort of touched on her artist self, her aesthetic self, her historic self.

Bike Breathe Believe was about advocacy for cancer. It was once she started, she got cancer, and she learned so much. I mean, anything that she touches, she learns, she investigates, she researches. She knows that ... She used to argue with her doctors and know more than some of them sometimes. And I used to say to her, “Isabella, you have to try this strategy when you’re talking to your doctor,” because I’m a doctor. And we would argue about medications. And she would just know so much.

That nonprofit was a new space for her of ... What a 180, right? To go from into the world of illness and when your body doesn’t do exactly what you want it to do. And knowing that this type of cancer is so common in people who’ve never smoked. And we all learned a tremendous amount, but that was a beautiful shift that her life took in terms of how she responded to her cancer. But of course, what else would Isabella do? I mean, that was the only path for Isabella was to become an advocate and become a speaker and had a nonprofit and give other people strength.

ND: Right. She wasn’t going to sit back. She was going to go head first.

And that’s the thing. You mentioned the lung cancer as a never-smoker. She dealt with that for six years? And she was ...

Can you speak to how she dealt with that? Or is that something you want to touch upon? Or ...

MM: I think she may even have lived longer than anyone else with this stage of cancer. And her incredible fitness allowed her to withstand any number of clinical trials, which she put herself through at great expense, largely because she wanted to support research into this cancer. And so, she withstood enormous suffering, but would do it and would sort of bounce back. We would all sort of had this idea that she would maybe never die because she would get through these things, and then she’d be back in the pool or walking.

But she would always just talk about, “Don’t look up the mountain. Just look in front of you, and take that one step. You can’t try to imagine the whole journey, or you won’t be able to make it. You have to just look at the one day at a time and the one footstep that you need to take.” And she would just seem to get through everything in this way. That was heroic, really.

ND: She’s an inspiration, for sure.

SJ: To just add, even when it was awful, and lots of times it was absolutely awful, and she felt so horrific, clearly, and you couldn’t even imagine, but you knew that if you could see that she was in such pain, no other mortal would survive. But she managed to find things. At one point, they got bird feeders. And literally the only thing she could do, and I’m totally choking up, was watch the birds because she was so broken. And she managed to take joy out of that. And ...

ND: She always found the positive in things. And she always kept moving, like you said, Melissa, one step at a time, and that speaks to her heart and who she was, and that’s amazing.

MM: She could also, though ... She could see the negative. She was super honest about politics and what she thought and what she thought was wrong and what she thought was right. She had a very strong ethical backbone, and so she could be piercingly judgmental when appropriate. She was not a Pollyanna.

ND: I think I would say she spoke truth to power. She challenged her doctors and said, “No, this is what you need to do.” We’ll say truth to power. How about ...

SJ: And inspired everyone to do better. Whatever particular race you were on, you went a little further. It wasn’t the same race that she was on. We had a rule. You can’t compare yourself to Isabella because fool’s errand. But whatever race you were on, you always could push yourself further thinking of her and thinking of what she would say and how she would be supportive.

MM: But I like the way you say everyone’s on a different race because she didn’t ... I was one of the people who never kept up with anything or wanted to. And my current fiance, who she introduced me to, and we’re together because of her ... He also couldn’t do any of the things. And she tried to get us to. And she would be ... She had her friends who would go on the mountain, scale the mountains with her, and do all these things. And then she also had us friends who would just kind of wave from the sideline and ...

SJ: Comic relief friends is where I considered myself.

MM: I know.

ND: There’s the skiing, and then there’s the après skiing. You need both two types of people. It works.

MM: I like that. Sue, we were après skiing.

ND: Yes.

Is there any final thought or favorite quality of Isabella that you want to discuss?

SJ: But to her bottomless curiosity, love, support, and joy. I don’t know. Those ... I think that ...

ND: That sounds like her from this discussion.

MM: I would say it’s the way that she brought people together. She would often be the host the events for our class. I now have a friendship with these roommates of hers, and it was only I know Sue and these other wonderful women because of ...

Because of her.

SJ:  I mean, some ... There are definitely a lot of people who we were friends with before but wouldn’t necessarily be still in contact with. And Melissa and I ... Absolute example of that. And so many people. She was also ... Her hospitality was amazing. She was just unbelievable in how generous she was.

ND: That’s great. Well, I think we’re going to leave it there. Melissa, Susan, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about your friend, Isabella. Thank you.

The PAW Memorials PAWcast is produced by Princeton Alumni Weekly. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. You can read transcripts of every episode at paw.princeton.edu. Music for this podcast is licensed from Universal Production Music.