might be.
     She died at the age of 17, when I was 9, of the same horrendous dose of
fallout that everyone in our neighborhood got dusted with that year (I lived
in Pasadena, CA, then;  this was 1954, and the fallout was from the Nevada
A-bomb tests).  Except for her arthritis, she'd never been sick a day of her
life until that horrible Summer;  then she suddenly developed explosive
popcorn lymphoma, and they put her to sleep because it was strangling her
from the inside out.  I was sick nearly unto death myself from the fallout,
and so her passing went by before I knew it.  But when she was gone, the
Sunlight went out of my world -- the only mother I had ever known, the only
mother-love I'd ever had, was gone forever.
   Whatever there is decent within me, or courageous, or loving, or good, it
is from her.  She was truly one of the great ones.  Never say "_only_ a cat"
-- "_only_ an animal."  _Think_:  she had to have been the world's greatest
anthropologist to have done what she did!  Not all the Great Ones among us
are human.  In fact, most aren't.  Most aren't noted by us at all.  They are
our pets, our livestock, or our working animals -- or living wild, unknown to
us entire.  They carry almost all the True Magick of the world.  And Paddy,
my mother, was one of them.
 
[Posted in FML issue 0804]