Diefenbaker proposed to her in Paddockwood, Saskatchewan, while she was a school teacher, and they were married on December 8, 1953.
They had no children together, but they raised a daughter from her previous marriage to Toronto solicitor Harry Palmer, who died less than three years after the birth of the child.
On her husband's death in 1979, her remains, buried in 1976 in Ottawa, were reburied in Saskatoon in 1979.