Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat - By David Dosa Page 0,62
waiting for me at the door. I stopped in the kitchen to pour myself a cup of coffee. Then I sat down at a table in the dining area to begin to plan out who I needed to call. Suddenly, there was a noise in the chair next to me. I looked over and there was Oscar sitting on his hindquarters, eyeing me. It was like he was checking up on me to make sure I would be okay.”
She smiled widely now. “You know, throughout this process, people would come and go. But Oscar would stay. He was really there for me. In fact, he was the last ‘person’ I saw that morning as I left the unit. He just sat there on the nurse’s desk staring at me as the doors closed behind me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little,
they become its visible soul.”
JEAN COCTEAU
IT WAS TIME TO STOP. I HAD NOW SPOKEN TO A HALF dozen people whose loved ones had died with Oscar by their side. I had plumbed their memories and emotions, and learned a lot more about what Alzheimer’s does to families. But I was still surprised by how little I knew about Oscar.
I didn’t feel frustrated, though. While I didn’t feel enlightened necessarily, I did feel oddly elated. The image I was left with was that of Oscar walking Cyndy Viveiros down the hall and sitting with her in the darkened dining area—as he had sat with her mother in her final days. Maybe that’s all he was: a companion, a sentient being who might accompany one person on their journey to the next world, or another through the grief of losing one they loved—a kind of underworld of its own. Wasn’t that enough?
Did it matter if he had some extrasensory power of perception, if he could pick up on impending mortality before the best minds of medicine could? Maybe he was just a master of empathy. Maybe caring was his superpower.
I needed to talk to Mary.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said, that Oscar has forty-one family members and when one of them is in trouble, he goes and stays with them.”
It was a little before three in the afternoon and Mary and I were sitting in her office. She had asked the staff to assemble at the nurse’s desk at three, and I had arrived in time to get a few words in with her before the changing of the guard. The worries of our last encounter—the latest funding crisis, the Sisyphusean task of running the floor of this nursing home—seemed to have vanished, and she was looking calm and collected. She was also being quite modest.
“Oh, David, that’s just my theory,” she said. “What do I know? You have to remember, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool animal lover. It’s not like I’m objective.”
“Objectivity has its limits,” I said. “Remember, I started out not believing in Oscar. To be honest, I thought you guys were all a little crazy.”
“You know what the sign says,” said Mary with a smile. “you don’t have to be crazy to work here—but it helps!”
“But now I think that Oscar has some purpose,” I continued. “Maybe he’s meant to help the residents—the family members, as you put it. But also their family; they may be the ones who suffer the most.”
“Don’t forget the staff,” said Mary. She was fully engaged now, playing Watson to my Holmes. “You can’t work up here and not become involved in the lives of your patients. We come to love these people, David. Their loss grieves us, too. In the end, we often become as close spiritually and emotionally to these patients as their own family members.”
“Does it help to have seen so many die with Alzheimer’s?” I asked. “Doesn’t it make it any easier?”
She thought for a minute before answering. “It makes it easier to understand what’s happening,” she said finally, “but not why. Why would anyone be afflicted like this? Why would God allow this to happen?”
Though we seldom touched on the subject of religion, I took a chance and asked her, “Do you pray, Mary? I mean, have you asked God why?”
She smiled without directly answering the question. “I don’t think He’d answer right away,” she said.
No, I thought. He’ll take a message and get back to you.
“As I’ve said before, the thing you have to remember about domesticated animals,” Mary said, as if she’d been reading my mind, “is that people started to keep