If only we could predict the time of a person's death so many of us would have closure and be able to deal with the grief that accompanies the passing of a loved one.Somehow it seems that we always leave for just that one moment, and then it's over.
In a new book just published by Dr. David Dosa we meet an amazing animal who seems to have the gift of knowing when a person will die. And the animal - a cat named Oscar - always found a little time to spend with those persons at the final moments.
When Dr Dosa first heard the stories of this cat with a special gift he was was skeptical.
How could a cat living in a nursing home regularly predict patients' deaths by snuggling alongside them in their final hours?
So he set out to follow Oscar and Dosa's doubts eroded after he and his colleagues tallied about 50 correct calls made by Oscar over five years.
That is the story he tells his book released this week, "Making Rounds With Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat."
Dosa finds Oscar's real worth in his fierce insistence on being present when others turn away from life's most uncomfortable topic: death.
"People actually were taking great comfort in this idea, that this animal was there and might be there when their loved ones eventually pass," Dosa said in an interview with the Associated Press.
"He was there when they couldn't be."
Dosa, 37, a geriatrician and professor at Brown University, works on the third floor of the Steere House, which treats patients with severe dementia. It's usually the last stop for people so ill they cannot speak, recognize their spouses and spend their days lost in fragments of memory.
He once feared that families would be horrified by the furry grim reaper, especially after Dosa made Oscar famous in a 2007 essay in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Instead, he says many caregivers consider Oscar a comforting presence, and some have praised him in newspaper death notices and eulogies.
"Maybe they're seeing what they want to see," he said, "but what they're seeing is a comfort to them in a real difficult time in their lives."
The nursing home adopted Oscar, a medium-haired cat with a grey-and-brown back and white belly, in 2005 because its staff thinks pets make the Steere House a home.
They play with visiting children and prove a welcome distraction for patients and doctors alike.
After a year, the staff noticed that Oscar would spend his days pacing from room to room. He sniffed and looked at the patients but rarely spent much time with anyone except when they had just hours to live.
He's accurate enough that the staff - including Dosa - know it's time to call family members when Oscar stretches beside their patients, who are generally too ill to notice his presence.
If kept outside the room of a dying patient, he'll scratch at doors and walls, trying to get in.
Nurses once placed Oscar in the bed of a patient they thought gravely ill. Oscar wouldn't stay put, and the staff thought his streak was broken. But it turns out the medical professionals were wrong, and the patient rallied for two days. In the final hours, Oscar held his bedside vigil without prompting.
Dosa believes the cat imitates the nurses who raised him or smells odours given off by dying cells, perhaps like some dogs who scientists say can detect cancer using their sense of scent.
At its heart, Dosa's search is more about how people cope with death than Oscar's purported ability to predict it.
Written with files taken from the Associated Press
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