Whenever a beloved one is sick, we would love to give them our unconditional attention, love and care to make their life more meaningful, and yet we don’t know when they will pass away. We can just make assumptions based on their health condition. Personally, I would like to know when a person I love passes away beforehand. It would give me an opportunity to be there for them and make my presence cherished before their departure from this physical 3D world. Would you?
This could really let us all understand how much life is precious and yet fragile. In a moment, everything can change. In a moment, everything changes, we lose people we love, jobs we love or hate, in a moment a stage of our existence can transform as everything is temporary.
For those who believe in Reincarnation (and I am one of them), Death is just another stage of Life, encompassing a further door to a new incarnation.
For rational thinkers, death is the end of a biological cycle.
This unique and touching story takes place at Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. A place where residents attained from Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative illnesses at the dementia unit live and wait without being really aware… till they pass away. In this same place, a little kitten arrived in July 2005 and was adopted by the compassionate nursing home’s staff who took care of this fluffy pet since the first day. In fact, Oscar, named by the nursing home’s residents after a famous American hot dog brand, has grown in that third-floor nursing home’s advanced dementia unit and he is perfectly integrated into the place along with the nursing home’s staff. In his daily strolls, Oscar intentionally walks towards specific rooms not to visit patients… but to make the staff realize the patient is about to die.
Oscar’s purposeful mission is to diagnose the next patient’s death and when this occurs exactly. I wonder how many of you think or believe cats have supernatural skills and metaphysical abilities… It is well known that throughout history, cats have been worshipped by many civilizations that believed in their divine essence. In fact, in Egypt, they were considered God-like figures, and so they did in ancient Chinese and Japanese civilizations.
Cats’ connection to the supernatural world and their amazing eyesight at night enabling them to perceive energies and auras better than any other animal make these felines highly sensitive creatures. Additionally, their exceptional hearing for higher-pitched sounds which is almost three times sharper than in humans allows them to hear sounds that humans cannot even perceive.
As living beings, we all emit electromagnetic fields and this is well sensed by cats that are masterful hunters especially at night, and can perfectly perceive and detect this energy. So Oscar can predict when someone is about to die by the energy they emit? Perhaps, this is an explanation.
Oscar is also able to assess each resident’s condition, and this is not a random guess. During one of his strolls, which confirms this as a fact, this mystic guardian of lives in transition walks till reaching the end of the hallway and stops outside rooms… as it happens often.
The episode I am narrating happened during one of his famous intentional rounds when he walked and stopped in front of room 310. After waiting patiently for a nurse to open the door for more than 20 minutes, Oscar got into the room where an aged lady consumed by cancer slept intermittently and not so deeply. Oscar saw the lady, smelled around accurately, but soon after, he left the room.
The lady he smelled and left soon after was not about dying, but the patient in the next room was. Oscar got into the room, smelled the other aged lady and snuggled next to her. When the nurse noticed the cat, the activities for the final stage of the lady’s life rushed immediately: the staff took the patient’s medical records, a priest was called and relatives of the lady were warned on time to come one last time to say goodbye.
And this ritual keeps going on and on for more than a decade. As a matter of fact, Oscar is very sharply attracted to each resident when their time comes. Why so? It’s a mystery. Not even Dr David Dosa, a researcher and physician at Brown University and geriatrician at Rhode Island hospital who wrote an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007 and a New York Times bestselling book about Oscar, cannot explain it rationally.
Through his observations, Dr Dosa is fully aware that the fluffy tabby settles in a patient’s room only when they are about to die, otherwise, he gets in their room, smells them and things around, and leaves quite quickly.
The ritual for Oscar to accompany each one of the residents at the dementia unit on the third floor takes place from 4 hours to 2 hours before the patient dies. He just knows it and does what he has to do accordingly.
Why a tabby that is apparently so normal has a so essential role in a nursing home? Many people who passed their last hours in the company of their beloved ones before passing away could have had the same question popping up in their head, and yet no rational answer can arise and explain this odd cyclic phenomenon. I wonder how does Oscar feel every time he smells a patient near his last hour or two hours of human life. Maybe he can literally detect a slightly different odour of cells or hormones or he can pick on subtle cues or he can also pick up on the patient’s brainwaves.
How does Oscar predict Death in a so accurate way? Is it because the patient smells differently? We, humans, cannot perceive these subtle changes, but cats do. Is it because Oscar has a sort of psychic connection with the patient? This cat acts as a “familiar”, a term used at the time of witchcraft to define cats as constant companions of witches.
Doctors are dumbfounded as well as other palliative care specialists who cannot assess their patients’ death and predict it as accurately as their fluffy fellow can. Oscar just settles in the patient’s room and sits quietly next to them about two hours before they die. He exactly knows when they are ready to leave otherwise he can be found under a doctor’s desk or sunbathing somewhere in some of the hospice’s offices far from humans. The doctors and staff of the nursing home know Oscar is not that friendly and quite uninterested in connecting with living humans.
Unless Oscar is solicited by his calling, he is a loner. His gift developed gradually. In fact, when he was a kitten, he was a scared kitty, and oftentimes he was more secluded and would spend hours hiding in some closets or under beds, but when he smelled death for one or more residents, he would come out from his hiding place and head towards the patient’s room. He’d curl up near them while giving some uplifting comfort and make the transition easier emotionally and psychologically.
Many families and relatives of the residents who passed away are grateful to Oscar for his presence that could relieve their beloved ones before leaving. Surely reactions about this unique cat’s mission seem diverse for different reasons. Some people see an angelic sign in the way Oscar accompanies patients, some others think of him as a harbinger of bad news. However his purposeful mission is perceived, Oscar gives attention, love and care to people who are still somehow very little conscious about their ending time on Earth because of their state or condition, and he also gives precious insights to the doctors around and to the nursing staff.
Just a few hours before that very moment happens for a patient or more patients to end their life, and many of them can feel fearful, afraid, lonely, desperate, sad, or just numb, Oscar’s presence comforts them and gives them a sudden sense of alleviation as an old friend’s visit to appease their soul.