Making Rounds with Oscar

The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat
Hyperion (paperback), 2010, reprint 2011, 256 pp

In a nursing home in Rhode Island, a cat named Oscar displayed a mysterious gift: He seemed to know when a resident was about to die. Oscar would then come to the resident's bed to lie beside him or her, giving comfort to the dying resident as well as to family or loved ones who were in the room for the final hours of life. Between visits Oscar would sit Sphinx-like on a windowsill, "regal and mysterious," simply being a cat.

David Dosa, MD, chronicles Oscar's gifts in his 2010 book "Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat." So the book has been around a while, but I just came upon it recently. A physician friend recommended the book to me, and at first I wasn't interested. Too far fetched. Too weird. But I downloaded the book on my Kindle and was immediately drawn in to the nursing-home world of Dr. Dosa, the nurses and caregivers, and the unique residents they watched over.

As I read, I found Dr. Dosa as skeptical as I was. At the repeated urging of one of the nurses, he interviewed the families of people who'd died on Oscar's watch, trying to determine whether the cat's visits to the dying were coincidental or purposeful. What could a cat know about death?

I also learned that Dr. Dosa's book was about a lot more than Oscar and his fellow cats at the nursing home. Much wisdom about the effects of illness, and the realities of death and dying, is packed into the doctor's review of Oscar's "work."

In cases of extreme personality changes caused by dementia, it seems we have to learn to say goodbye to the person we've known, even before that person is close to dying. I found the insights people had about their loved ones' illnesses and their eventual deaths to be valuable life lessons. In his interviews, Dr. Dosa heard about guilt -- lots of guilt -- and anger and grief, and learned much about how families dealt with these tough emotions.

Having a near relative with a recent stroke made the comments doubly useful to me. Someone with significant physical changes, such as paralysis of limbs or loss of the ability to speak, is also profoundly changed by disease. A different person, the stroke victim, emerges.

The dementia victims Dr. Dosa describes seem to disappear in a different way, as they lose the ability to recognize a spouse or form a coherent sentence. But I do think the obvious changes some illnesses bring require us to redefine the person affected, whether mentally or physically, and grow into a different relationship with the "new" person.

For another physician friend, a neurologist and psychiatrist who had not yet read the book, Oscar's behavior was a bit threatening. "I think I'd be real nervous if that cat even started toward me," he told me. So the catness of the story overwhelms the reality of the many insights the author gives us on attitudes toward illness, how we think about approaching death, and the realities of confronting changed people who are close to us . . . or were.

If you or anyone you know is struggling with a loved one who's challenged by great medical changes, "Making Rounds with Oscar" is well worth reading. Even if you're not sure whether Dr. Dosa solves the mystery of Oscar's gift, you'll come out richer for the read.

A piece in Daily Variety (August 20, 2010) says that a movie about Oscar was underway at that time. You can read all about the proposed film, and get more background, at Feline Oscar heads to bigscreen: Famous cat comforts dying in nursing center, in Variety online.

LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE YOUR NAME

Vendela Vida
HarperCollins, 226 pp.

In far-north Lapland, Clarissa Iverton goes looking for her origins, searching for her father and looking, of course, for what she can learn about who and what she’s come from. Can we ever know?

From New York, Clarissa travels to Helsinki and north to the Arctic Circle, where it’s so cold a snow-mobiler gets frostbite when a new face mask doesn’t quite cover his face. The air is cold, the days are dark, and so is this story. Joan Didion is quoted as saying of Vida’s first novel, “[This book] is so fast, so mesmerizing to read, and so accomplished that it’s hard to think of it as a first novel, which it is.” I agree the story here is also accomplished, insofar as pace and structure are concerned. But I found it neither fast nor mesmerizing.



How can you be mesmerized by people you can’t possibly like? It’s not the fabled oddness of far-north Scandinavians that makes them unlikeable (to me). Or maybe it is. Can you relate to a reindeer herder? A Sami healer with secrets? Maybe so. There's also something I can only call superficial about Clarissa. Yes, she has problems. Yes, I empathize. But I don't much care for her even so.

I do love Vida’s style; she is a poetic writer and captures the darknesses in the heart as well as in the days.

The best thing about this book to me is the title. Erase your name. Think about it. I guess the northern lights could do it right.