On Wednesday March 10, 2021, Paula Young O’Neil, loving mother of four, grandmother of five, and great-grandmother of three, passed away peacefully, beautifully at 91.
Paula was born on July 31, 1929, in Wadsworth, Ohio, to Wayne and Edith Young. Paula moved to Arizona in 1953 where she met her first husband, John Morton Carder. Paula moved with John to Albuquerque in 1954 where they had three children, John Carder, Sally Olsen and Mary Thomas.
After losing her first husband in an auto accident in 1958, Paula moved with her three children, ages 3, 2 and 6 months back to Ohio, and then on to Anchorage that summer. After surviving an Alaskan winter on whale blubber and moose burger, Paula – forever following the sun in pursuit of an unfettered frontier life – returned to New Mexico with her three children. She enrolled at the University of New Mexico to complete her Bachelor’s degree.
While attending UNM, Paula met her second husband, Brian O’Neil, a Professor of Philosophy at UNM, and together had Paula’s fourth child, Michael O’Neil.
Paula, Brian and Michael later moved near Golden, New Mexico, on the back side of the Sandia Mountains atop Heartbreak Hill to establish a subsistence homestead, later known as Praise the Lord Ranch. This reflected Paula’s deep faith and trust in God, a faith Paula would lean on heavily over the next decade as she organized and successfully led her neighborhood against five separate mining companies to prevent strip mining of her beloved mountains.
After losing Brian to cancer in 1986, Paula served as a missionary with Open Doors, smuggling Bibles into China. Paula then moved to the Twin Sisters area outside Nederland, Colorado, to be closer to her son, John and his wife Susan. After surviving her own bout with cancer in 2012, she moved to Durango, Colorado, to be closer to her two daughters, Mary and Sally.
Paula’s vibrant love and seemingly limitless energy shines on through her family and friends.
(Originally published in the April 1, 2021, edition of The Mountain-Ear.)
