by Ezra Nadav

Diego was never supposed to be my cat.

When I moved to Berwick in October 2021, he belonged to the neighbours across the street. I didn’t know that at first. He didn’t wear a collar, and he certainly didn’t behave as though he belonged anywhere else.

He simply started appearing.

Then he started staying.

And somewhere along the way, without discussion, paperwork or anyone particularly deciding anything, Diego decided that I was his human.

I suppose I agreed.

That was how our life together began.

There was nothing dramatic about it. No adoption day. No photograph of our first meeting. No moment when I carried him through the front door and announced that he was home.

He just gradually became part of the shape of my days.

He would curl up with me in front of the fireplace. He would snuggle beside me while I read. If I was working in the garden, Diego supervised. If I was working in the office, Diego supervised that too.

He took his responsibilities seriously.

And we talked.

Diego was an extraordinarily talkative cat. I would ask him about his day and he would tell me. He would ask about mine and, naturally, I would answer.

We had long conversations whose precise details were known only to us.

There was one subject on which he was particularly clear: my singing.

Diego did not approve.

I would start singing and he would look at me with the particular expression of a cat wondering why, after all these years, his human persisted with something at which he was so obviously untalented.

We understood one another.

For nearly three years, that was our life in Berwick.

Then, in June 2024, I moved to Balaclava.

And for the first time, I had to confront something we had both apparently understood long before I had put it into words.

Diego wasn’t technically mine.

I was moving away from the neighbourhood where his original family lived. He had people there. He would be cared for. The sensible thing—the proper thing, perhaps—was to leave him in Berwick.

So that was the plan.

Until the final day.

I was cleaning the empty house, finishing the last pieces of a life there, and Diego was with me.

I looked at him.

And I knew.

I couldn’t leave him.

More importantly, I knew he didn’t want me to.

For three years Diego had been choosing me. On that final day in Berwick, I chose him back.

So Diego came to Balaclava.

Our next adventure began.

Moving house did nothing to diminish his conviction that whatever I was doing was also Diego’s business. He came on drives with me, sitting in my lap and looking through the window as the world passed by.

Home, it turned out, wasn’t particularly complicated for Diego.

Home was wherever his people were.

Six months later, we moved again, this time to Carnegie.

There Diego regained something he had missed: the outdoors.

He explored. He wandered. He made friends. He accumulated admirers and pats. He found places to sit in gardens and places where no sensible creature would choose to sleep. He supervised whatever project I happened to be undertaking.

And then his world became larger in another way.

He met Marcie.

There are relationships in our lives that don’t require anyone to surrender their place for somebody else to enter. Love simply makes another space.

Diego had chosen me years earlier.

Now he chose her too.

About ten weeks before we lost him, he and I moved again.

This time it was different.

This was our forever home.

Diego arrived with me and Marcie, and joined Dov and Rocky, Sershee and Hamish.

For a cat who had once simply appeared from across the street, he had accumulated quite a family.

Hamish and Diego became fast friends.

They talked to one another. They kissed. They shared our bed and, with the supreme confidence of cats, shared Marcie and me as well.

At night there were bodies everywhere—human, feline, occasionally more than seemed geometrically possible—and Diego was right where he belonged.

During the day, he explored the backyard.

I was working on the courtyard, slowly turning it into a place where all of us could spend time together. Diego, naturally, supervised.

There were plants to investigate, sunny places to occupy and garden beds requiring inspection.

He had his favourite spot.

I didn’t know then just how important that little piece of the garden would become.

About two weeks before Diego died, we noticed that he was losing weight.

We thought perhaps it was simply his new life.

There was so much more activity now. He did laps through the house. He explored the courtyard. There were new animals, new people, new places and new routines.

Diego was busy.

But during his final week, something changed.

The cat who had always had something to say became quiet.

He stopped talking with us.

He slept more.

And he stopped purring.

We didn’t know what it meant yet.

On his last day, I was outside working in the backyard—the place I was making for all of us—while Diego slept on our bed.

That had become his place over those final weeks. Every night, he slept there with us.

Marcie found him.

He’d had an accident. He’d been sick.

And he wasn’t really present anymore.

I picked him up.

Normally Diego would have had an opinion about what happened next.

This time he didn’t argue.

I put him into a carrier he had never been in before and took him to the emergency vet.

The news was the news nobody wants.

Cancer.

There was nothing we could fix. Nothing we could build, move, change or make better.

There was only one thing left that we could give him.

Us.

So I held him.

We cuddled him and snuggled him and told him all our loves.

For a week, Diego hadn’t purred.

But there, in my arms, he started again.

And they were some of his best purrs ever.

I don’t need to decide what those purrs meant.

I knew Diego.

He had spent years telling me exactly what he thought.

And in those last few minutes, we told him all our loves.

And he told us his.

Then we said goodbye.

The next morning, we prepared Diego’s forever home.

Not somewhere unfamiliar.

Not somewhere separate from us.

We laid him to rest in his favourite sitting spot in the garden.

The garden he had explored.

The garden he had supervised me working in.

The garden I had been making for all of us.

Last night, we gathered around the fire pit.

Marcie was there. Dov and Rocky were there. Marcie’s kid was there. And Diego was there too, resting nearby in the place he had chosen.

We talked about him.

About the ridiculous things.

The ordinary things.

The things that hurt to remember and the things that made us laugh.

And I thought about the strange little journey that had brought him there.

A black cat without a collar sitting outside a house in Berwick.

A cat who technically belonged to somebody across the street.

A cat who kept coming back.

A cat who decided, without asking anyone’s permission, that I was his person.

He followed me from Berwick to Balaclava, from Balaclava to Carnegie, and finally into the home where Marcie and I intended to build our life.

Along the way he acquired fireplaces and gardens, car rides and beds, dogs and cats, friends and admirers.

He found Marcie.

He found Hamish.

He found a family.

And he found his forever home.

I wish forever had been longer.

Of course I do.

But perhaps forever isn’t measured only by how long something lasts.

Perhaps sometimes it is simply the place where you finally belong.

Diego spent the first part of our story choosing me.

On that last day in Berwick, I chose him.

And in the years that followed, through every house and every change, we kept choosing each other.

He looked after me.

I looked after him.

And now, when we sit around the fire in the backyard, his favourite place is only a few steps away.

The courtyard is almost finished.

There will always be another plant to move, another stone to straighten, another project requiring supervision.

And I suspect I will always look toward his spot occasionally, expecting to see a black cat watching me work.

Perhaps, in the ways that matter, I still will.

Because Diego was never supposed to be my cat.

He just decided I was his human.

And he was right.

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Zichrono livrachah.

May his memory be a blessing.