Persistent Niagara couple makes it to altar
A shrinking guest list, floods and family emergencies didn’t stop Chris and Mindy Lortie from exchanging vows at Oct. 3 wedding
All Mindy and Chris Lortie wanted to do was get married. How hard could it be?
Like everything else in 2020, the answer was: Pretty hard.
And it was all going so smoothly.
They were good friends as teenagers, but never dated. After high school, they lost contact with each other and had other relationships, before a chance meeting at Niagara College brought them together again.
“It was the day after I broke up with my ex,” remembers Mindy. “I didn’t even know Chris was at Niagara. He just happened to pass me in the hall … it was such weird timing.”
Things progressed quickly, they dated for about 18 months and a year and a half ago he proposed.
“They say the wedding planning process can make you want to pull your hair out, but I think that kind of got brought to anew level with everything that came up planning our wedding,” says Mindy, with a laugh.
For the two 24-year-olds, 2020 struck early.
Last November, the 100-yearold house they had just bought started to leak in the basement, eventually turning into a flood every time it rained. The sewer started backing up, too.
They had to move so much of their stuff out of the basement that Mindy and her friends ran out of space upstairs to make bouquets and plan for the autumn wedding.
Then in January, Mindy’s grandmother became ill, was hospitalized and quickly developed dementia. She died in May, after moving into longterm care.
By the spring, COVID-19 had forced them to shrink their plans for a 135-guest wedding down to one with 55 people in attendance. And with the financial strain the coronavirus had on everyone, they moved it from a hotel to her parents’ backyard.
In mid-September their cat got seriously ill.
The night before they were to take it to be euthanized, it crawled inside their couch and died. Now the couch had to be thrown out.
The same day, to control the spread of COVID-19 the province reduced the number of people who could gather.
“So on top of our cat passing away, the restrictions changing (and the basement flooding) we ended up just sitting in our living room on lawn chairs because we didn’t have a couch at that point,” says Chris with a laugh.
“And by the end of it, we had a whopping nine guests” at their Oct. 3 wedding, Mindy adds.
She says: “With everything that had happened, and having to un-invite people along the way, we decided to livestream the wedding.”
Their incredible shrinking wedding ended up being viewed nearly 1,800 times on Facebook.
But 2020 wasn’t finished with them yet — their plan to honeymoon in Cuba turned into a weekend getaway near Belleville.
“What I said to many people who said, ‘Why don’t you just push it to another time?’ was, the point is to get married. And we are still going to do that,” Chris says.
“And we did that.”