John McAuliffe, whose wife Paula was fatally struck by a car outside their home on Christmas Eve, stands in his living room in South Portland, on Wednesday. “It’s just unbelievable that she’s gone,” he said. “It’s impossible.” Sofia Aldinio/ Staff Photographer
The phone won’t stop ringing in the McAuliffe home.
In the days since Paula McAuliffe, 71, was hit and killed by a car while walking home from Christmas Eve Mass at Holy Cross Church in South Portland, her husband, John, has spent a lot of time talking logistics – with the police, with the church, with the funeral home.
But the complexities of organizing a funeral don’t account for the dozens of calls. Those have come, he says, because his wife was the type of person whom friends and family just can’t imagine life without.
“It’s just unbelievable that she’s gone,” he said. “It’s impossible.”
John McAuliffe, a deacon at St. John Paul II Parish in Portland, still doesn’t know exactly what police believe led to the crash that killed his wife near OTTO Pizza, barely 100 yards from the couple’s home. He plans on getting those details soon, but police have said that they don’t believe the driver was at fault. But as he and the couple’s son, Pat, endured a strange and sad Christmas, McAuliffe was more interested in reflecting on the “Renaissance woman” he married nearly 40 years ago.
‘I THINK THIS IS A KEEPER’
Their love felt like some type of fate.
They could have easily missed each other, and in fact they had. Paula Place, who had grown up in Yarmouth, attended the University of Southern Maine at the same time John was working on a degree at the school’s Portland campus, but they never crossed paths until later, when they were living in the same apartment building in Woodford’s Corner in the late 1970s. He remembers seeing her outside, fixing the carburetor on her motorbike, and thinking, “You know, I think this is a keeper.”
John McAuliffe shares Paula McAuliffe photographs from their wedding day in South Portland on Wednesday. ( Sofia Aldinio/ Staff Photographer
The couple soon started dating. She rose each morning at 3-4 a.m. to go to work as an engineer for WGME’s production department – a routine she kept for most of her 43 years with the TV station. At the conclusion of her shift, she would have a picnic lunch with John, then a social worker, at the park across from St. Joseph Church in Portland. They married there in 1984.
Paula McAuliffe knew how to fix more than just her bike. Working the morning shift meant she had plenty of daylight for projects, and she made the most of it. She was always mending or growing or building something – a shed behind the house, a cracked window, a broken sump pump. She volunteered in the library of the school their son attended. And when her husband had an opportunity to study to become a deacon, fulfilling a lifelong dream, she told him she could handle keeping the home in order while he trained.
“She had so much energy,” her husband remembers. “It would have tired me out 10 times over.”
When Paula McAuliffe retired in 2017, she turned even more of that energy toward her many passions, which were too numerous to count: art, travel, architecture, gardening, hiking, kayaking and, of course, people. Whether you were talking to her in your home or in a crowded cocktail party, she was able to convey that you had her full attention, John McAuliffe said. She was the type to check in with friends regularly, and not just about surface-level things, but about the parts of life that really matter.
“In a way,” her husband said, “she did a ministry on her own.”
‘GOD CALLED HER’
John McAuliffe holds the photo that his wife chose for her obituary two weeks prior to the accident. Sofia Aldinio/ Staff Photographer
John McAuliffe called home from the church on Sunday evening to see if his wife needed him to pick up anything for the family’s annual Christmas Eve roast beef dinner. Instead, his son picked up the phone: “Something terrible has happened.”
An avid walker, Paula McAuliffe had been hustling home to prepare dinner when she was hit stepping onto Highland Avenue between Cottage Road and Providence Avenue. Neighbors say they regularly see fender benders and close calls at the busy intersection.
At Maine Medical Center, doctors told McAuliffe that his wife had been killed in the crash. The hospital allowed him to see and bless her body, which he says has been a comfort to him – as has the fact that she took a sacrament just before her death.
“What a way to have your bags packed,” he said. “God called her, as he will with all of us. But could it have been another time?”
While it’s hard not to wish that he had more time with his wife, he said his faith has not been shaken. Just as he was fated to meet his wife all those years ago, he believes the crash must have been part of God’s plan, and he says she would feel the same way.
He imagines her keeping busy in heaven, trusty hammer in her hand.
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