Clifton ? When Renea Webber read about a cat in Rhode Island who seems to predict the deaths of nursing home patients, she began to wonder if a tabby at the facility where her late mother lived has the same ability.

Webber’s mother, Linda Webber, died at the Community Care nursing home April 25, about a month after moving there. Renea Webber, of Clay Center, said that when her mother was dying from lung cancer, a 5-year-old cat named Honey was there for her and other family members.

“I don’t think any of us could have made it without her. That cat would sit up there and knead on our bellies, as if to give us comfort,” Webber said.

Lynda Barnes, the Community Care administrator in training, said Honey has shown special attention to three of the four residents who have died in her year at the nursing home. The other resident who died couldn’t have cats in her room for medical reasons, Barnes said.

“She has totally gravitated to three of their rooms in the last few days of their lives. It is amazing,” Barnes said. “Otherwise, the cat just roams the halls and sleeps in empty rooms if there are not sick patients.”

Sandy Schwab, the day charge nurse at the 28-bed long-term care center and nursing home in Washington County, agrees that Honey seems to have a special ability.

“Whenever someone is under the weather or ill, that’s who she gravitates to, to lie on the bed or snuggle next to them,” Schwab said. “She’s very intuitive when someone is in need of emotional support. She’s displayed this a lot of times.”

Webber said that while it had never been uncommon for the cat to come into her mother’s room for short visits, Honey visited more often as Linda Webber’s health worsened. In her last two days of her life, the cat was there all the time, Renea Webber said.

“She was constantly either in there or outside the door. She would sit in the recliner in Mom’s room or on the commode, where she could see Mom in her bed,” Webber said.

“The funeral director told me later the cat followed him all the way to the door when he came to get Mom’s body. It was almost like she was saying ‘goodbye,'” Webber said.

In an essay in Thursday’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. David Dosa described how Oscar, a 2-year-old cat at Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, R.I., will curl up on a patient’s bed and stay there in the hours before the patient dies.

Susan Nelson, an assistant clinical professor at Kansas State University Veterinary Medicine Teaching Hospital in Manhattan, said she and her students believe it’s possible that cats may be able to sense when someone is going to die.

“I think we all find this incredibly interesting and intriguing. I don’t think we can explain it,” Nelson said.