Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat - By David Dosa Page 0,52

and sat down next to the telephone. His eyes fixed on me.

“Why don’t you go talk to Barbara, Oscar? Maybe you can convince her.”

He looked at me and for a second I imagined that he was considering my request—as if a cat would do what you wanted even if he could understand you. Instead he rolled on his belly in front of me in an invitation to scratch him. I reached over and paid my due diligence as he began to purr.

“You’re really just a cat, aren’t you?”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“People who love cats have some of the biggest hearts around.”

SUSAN EASTERLY

“THERE WAS A TIME WHEN I THOUGHT ABOUT WRITING a book about my experiences with my mother. I even had a name! I would call it The Lady Upstairs Who Looks Like My Mother.”

I was sitting in the parlor of Jack McCullough’s house in East Providence where he was telling me about Oscar’s first patient, his mother.

“I had to learn to love my mother as the person she had become,” he told me. “She looked like the person I grew up with, but she was different.”

At that he leaned back and smiled wistfully.

It had taken a while to get up the nerve to call Jack. Unlike the other people I had interviewed thus far, I didn’t know him. But Jack’s mother, Marion, was widely considered to be the first beneficiary of Oscar’s many vigils. She passed away in November 2005, when Oscar was still just a kitten. Not only that, but a little more than a year later, Jack’s aunt Barbara also died on the third floor with Oscar at her bedside. His was the first double-Oscar family that I knew of and I figured if anybody could lend some insight into why Oscar does what he does, Jack would be the man.

“Call him,” Mary had ordered one day as I ruminated about whether to contact him.

It’s an odd request to make, though, no matter how many times I’d done it already. “Hey, would you mind if I come over and talk to you about the cat who was with your mother when she died?”

But Mary was right. Jack had answered me with an emphatic yes.

“I’d love to talk to you about Oscar and what he meant to me,” he said.

The house was quaint, practically historic: The furniture was antique and had likely been passed down from generation to generation. We sat across an old coffee table from each other in a pair of recently upholstered wing chairs. Everywhere there were reminders of Jack’s mother Marion and her sister Barbara.

In one corner there was a photo of a grayish tabby cat, a pet from years ago, I imagined.

“Was your mother a cat person?”

Jack chuckled. “That’s an understatement! My mother grew up on a farm in southern Massachusetts. From her early childhood, she was always collecting stray kittens, feeding them with baby bottles and droppers. Her family always used to tease her and call her ‘Momma Kitty’ growing up because of all the little cats that would follow her around the farm.” Jack leaned over to pick up another gray tabby that had ambled into the parlor to assess the new arrival.

“Dr. Dosa, this is Bijou. I always used to say that Bijou was a reincarnation of Mittens, the cat we had growing up.” He pointed to the picture of the tabby. The two were almost identical.

He put the cat down and it scurried out of the room with incredible speed. “My mother always had this uncanny attraction to cats,” Jack said. “I suppose they felt safe with her. Even cats that would not come to anyone else would jump onto my mother’s lap. When I first got Bijou, my mother already had significant dementia and she lived in the apartment above me. I’d come home and look everywhere for the cat, and then I’d go upstairs and find him sitting with her.”

Jack excused himself to make a pot of coffee. He handed me a small photo album before he left.

“I put this together shortly before my mother died. I used to bring it to her and we’d leaf through it and look at the pictures together.”

The album was beautiful and well constructed. Thick expensive paper, expertly bound—it was the sort of thing Jack might have crafted himself or bought at a specialty store, not the local five-and-dime. As I admired the album, I realized how important the project must have been to Jack, how it must have helped him explore the