Solange Pauline Damaz died of cancer at home in Springs on Aug. 13. She was 91.
She was a woman who was “hard to summarize,” her family wrote in her eulogy. “It’s not just the many careers that she purported to have had: basketball player, elite volleyballer, social worker, model, businesswoman, cacao entrepreneur, stockbroker,” nor could she be simply summarized by “her boundless strength, especially in these last two years as she remained impressively valiant in her fight with cancer. She wanted to hit 90, and she beat the odds and did so. She wanted to meet her next great-grandbaby, and she beat the odds not once again but twice, welcoming both Mila and Balthazar into her family.”
Ms. Damaz was “always fearlessly and unapologetically herself,” said her daughter, Anne Halber-Dessaint. “She filled the room like no other.”
She loved gardening and “telling a good story, at times embellishing it to almost comical levels,” her granddaughter Clara Ojjeh wrote. “Mostly she loved her family and took great pride in having become a great-grandmother a few times over.”
“She taught us to cook, in the kitchen and in life, without a recipe,” her grandson Bart Dessaint wrote.
Ms. Damaz was born in Paris on July 24, 1933, to Paul Guillon and the former Fernande Touron. She grew up there, attending L’Ecole de la Prefecture.
With her first husband, Pierre Ganter, a doctor she was married to from 1954 to 1959, she had a son. She had a daughter with her second husband, Sam Halber, a businessman she met working in the cacao industry. They were married from 1964 to 1979.
She lived in Cannes from 1975 to 1980 before returning to Paris. In 1981 she married Paul Damaz, an architect, at the Springs Presbyterian Church. They moved to the United States the following year and for many years split their time between Springs and Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
In Springs, Ms. Damaz would enthusiastically host her extended family. “She obsessed over menus and assigned beds months in advance because she wanted us to come around,” her family wrote.
Mr. Damaz died in 2008. In 2015 she moved to Springs permanently.
In addition to Ms. Halber-Dessaint, who lives in New York City, Ms. Damaz is survived by her other child, Philippe Ganter of Bordeaux, France, and, in addition to Mr. Dessaint and Ms. Ojjeh, both of London, by two other grandchildren, Edouard Dessaint, also of London, and Mary Ganter of Bordeaux. She leaves three great-grandchildren.
A service was held on Sunday at Green River Cemetery in Springs, where she was buried next to Mr. Damaz.
