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Deachman: High school sweethearts reunited 40 years later in supportive housing

Marc Marier and Joanne Higgs broke up in the 1970s. A string of bad luck later in life led them both to a residence run by the Shepherds of Good Hope — and finally some good fortune.

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When Marc Marier moved into a supportive housing residence in Kanata a handful of years ago, he didn’t expect to fall in love.

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And when Joanne Higgs tentatively approached Marier on one of his first days at the Hope Living residence — the reaction she got was also wholly unexpected.

“Are you Marc from Highland Park?” she nervously asked when she saw him in the lounge.

“Yes,” Marc answered before taking a scrap of paper from his wallet and handing it to her.

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On it was written her phone number from more than 40 years earlier, when the pair — students at Highland Park High School, a now-closed vocational school on Broadview Avenue — dated one another. He’d been carrying that number with him all that time. She cried when she saw it.

They had not seen one another since high school, and the road that reunited them was a messy and highly improbable one, marked by injury, illness, death and homelessness. That it ends where it has is almost a grim fairy tale — but a fairy tale nonetheless. And it’s not yet over; there’s every opportunity for the pair to live happily ever after.

They were sweethearts — each others’ first loves — from Grade 10 until shortly before the end of high school. Today, they are sweethearts once again.

They were in their mid to late teens back then. Higgs — at the time Joanne Nicholson and the younger of the two by two years — was studying horticulture. Marier was taking auto mechanics. They shared a Grade-10 science class, where the first spark ignited. “I looked at her and she looked back at me,” Marier recalls, “and I decided then that I had to get to know her.”

And they did, sharing meals at Westgate shopping centre, or taking in movies, either at Westgate or the drive-in at Bayshore. A trip to the Museum of Science and Technology. A dance. They visited with each other’s families. They sometimes skipped school together.

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“I remember how beautiful she was,” recalls Marier. “And the way she talked — she talked very nice to me.”

“He was kind and sweet,” says Higgs. “And handsome.”

And then came the crash: an argument over Marier’s — how to put it? — wandering eye. Higgs ended the relationship. Soon after, their graduation from high school sent them off on different paths.

Marier moved up north for a while, then back to Ottawa, where he worked in security on Parliament Hill, and then at the airport, doing pre-board security screening — “checking for guns and weapons.”

Higgs married and worked as a dietary aide at a nursing home and, later, a cleaner at the Rideau Centre.

In all that time, neither heard from nor saw the other.

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If fate had any sort of hand in their reunion, it might have begun in 2017, the year that Higgs’s second husband, James, with whom she’d been married for 18 years, died following a heart attack. That same year, a knee injury forced Marier to retire. At about the same time, Marier’s brother, with whom he was living, was diagnosed with dementia. Unable to cover the rent for both of them, Marier moved into the Ottawa Mission, where he says he largely kept to himself.

Even then, though, his thoughts often wandered to Joanne. Despite having no reasonable expectation of finding her, he kept watch for her on the streets. Every now and then he called her number: out of service.

He spent a year (“and 45 days,” he adds) at the Mission, leaving around 2018 when the City placed him at Hope Living, a 100-bed supportive living residence in Kanata run by the Shepherds of Good Hope. It focuses on the homeless and the vulnerably housed, providing stability, permanence and a fresh start.

Neither Marier nor Higgs expected this kind of fresh start.

They see each other every day now. Their dates aren’t the same as when they were teenagers, but they aren’t all that different, either: Jigsaw puzzles, pool, yoga classes. They watch The Young and the Restless together and go on walks on nearby trails. There are occasional outings organized by the Shepherds, like the one to the Experimental Farm where a sheep tried to chew Higgs’s jacket.

Their feelings haven’t changed much, either.

“I love Marc,” says Higgs. “He has a great personality.”

“I just love the way she is,” says Marier. “She’s quiet, and I love the way she talks to me nice. I want to spend the rest of my life with her.”

They don’t live together; they’re on different floors and each has a roommate. They’re hoping that might change, but the building is full right now. And because of assigned seating in the dining hall, they don’t often take their meals together. They’re talking about getting married, perhaps in a couple of years, at City Hall. CPP benefits and money complicate the decision, says Marier. Their feelings for each, however, other don’t.

Besides, what’s the rush? Neither is planning on going anywhere else now that they’re together again.

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