Got a cat with special abilities? Who ya gonna call?
None other than Providence Journal reporter Mark Arsenault, the natural choice for the assignment to write about Oscar the cat, who, as described in the New England Journal of Medicine, "seems to know when people are about to die" at a Providence nursing and rehabilitation center.
Felines often figure in the mystery fiction of Arsenault, a versatile scribe and prolific novelist, who put aside a ProJo project for the opportunity to write today about Oscar, dubbed "the cat of death" by talk-show host John DePetro. General VonKatz, a character in two of Arsenault's novels, Spiked, and Speak Ill of the Living, is based on his own cat, Node, now 11. "I tell him 11 is the new nine," says the reporter.
Arsenault, who was pitched the Oscar story by Tim Murphy, a ProJo editor, acknowledges, "It is perfect for me."
The scribe, who patted Oscar on the head while reporting the story yesterday, calls him, "a nice cat, a chubby cat. He's not starving over there." Meeting the feline late in the afternoon "was pretty interesting . . . He seems like just such an ordinary cat, but you know that he has this . . . power." Arsenault adds that he would be more skeptical about Oscar's predictive abilities had they not been described in the New England Journal.
Node and his two sisters came into the reporter's life when he was working for the Sun of Lowell, Massachusetts, and living in nearby Westford. He caught the trio with a cardboard box and chicken salad. Hosting the trio was "like having squirrels in your home," but Node got to stay, Arsenault says, since he exhibited more poise. Asked about Node's influence on his creativity, he says, "He somehow seems to know when my writing's not going well."
Of course, with animal stories proving irresistible to newspaper editors and readers, Arsenault's tale (tail?) has quickly gone national. Here is the top of the ProJo reporter's account:
PROVIDENCE — Death walks silently among us, invisible except to the cat’s eyes.
The cat would be Oscar. He seems to know when people are about to die.
Doctors cannot say for sure how Oscar does it, but they insist the 2-year-old house cat, one of six cats at Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, has foretold the deaths of more than 25 residents.
Oscar’s uncanny prophecies are described today in The New England Journal of Medicine, in an article by geriatrician Dr. David M. Dosa, an assistant professor at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.
The stocky long-haired cat lives among patients with severe dementia, in an end-state ward in which death is a common event. The facility treats people with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
“There are weeks that three or four people will die in that unit, and Oscar will nail every one of them,” says Dosa, “I know it’s seemingly far-fetched,” but he has repeatedly witnessed Oscar’s odd gift. “It’s a very surreal thing.”
Usually about two to four hours before a patient dies, Oscar goes to them.
He hops onto the bed, curls up, and stays with them.
The cat’s “mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing-home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death, allowing staff members to adequately notify families,” wrote Dosa, in his article for the Journal of Medicine.