Hastings

My brave little man is gone.

In the autumn of 2010, I was living with a girlfriend in the Lower Garden District of New Orleans after a time living in Guatemala when, one evening, a sleek baby strolled through the open door of our ramshackle flat and deposited himself to go to sleep on our bed. In the loquacious nature of the Crescent City, I soon found out that the feline, who some had named Peanut, in fact “lived” in the parking lot of a veterinarian’s office called The Cat Practice and sauntered casually back and forth from there through the rushing traffic of Magazine Street to our one block lane. There was clearly something special about him even then, so, noting his regal and dignified bearing, I adopted him and named him Hastings, after the street where I had found him.

Thus began 14 years of mutual adventure with what was by far the most intelligent animal I have ever known. Along with his Persian brother Winston, who went to his great reward in 2017, Hastings provided immense comfort and solace to me during some incredibly rough waters, which included the deaths of family, friends, the immense stress of doing the kind of reporting I do while trying to keep body and soul together financially and all of the other hurdles that life throws at you.

From the start, there was something of the mystic about Hastings, which I attributed to his creole voodoo roots. Once, as I lay reading on the floor of another apartment in NOLA’s Irish Channel, I saw Hastings staring wide-eyed at something across the room and followed his gaze to see, much to my astonishment, what I can only describe as a globe-shaped form that looked something like a miniature sun floating through our apartment about two feet off the ground. Almost as soon as my eyes fixed on it, it exploded (there is really no other word to use) with an almighty pop, sending Hastings and I leaping backwards. I never figured out what the apparition was or even could have been, only that Hastings alerted me to its presence in our midst. Other times I would find him, eyes fixed, gazing at something in the room I couldn’t see, something that seemed to be beyond this realm.

When we later moved uptown in New Orleans, Hastings would patrol the half of the lovely cottage we had front to back and engage in meaningful gazes with the street cats I would feed on the porch outside. For four years it was just Hastings and Winston and I bouncing around Louisiana and Florida. In Miami, during my years living in North Beach, where I wrote some of my book on the Democratic Republic of Congo and all of my book on Mexico, and then later in Coconut Grove, where I wrote my second book on Haiti, Hastings would inevitably curl up next to my laptop on my desk, slumbering contentedly as I poured out hundreds of thousands of words. When I was out of money and living briefly in a tiny apartment in an area of Fort Myers Beach subsequently leveled by Hurricane Ian - taking the bus to get my groceries because I couldn’t afford a car, surrounded by RV parks and fishing charters and drowning my ennui at Doc Ford's Rum Bar - Hastings was there. When we were living in New York and Pennsylvania, he would stare out the window in wonder at the snow. In Viejo San Juan, he looked down like a monarch at the fluttering pigeons and roaming gatos from our top floor flat. Though clearly the boss, he welcomed the variety of strays I brought into our family over the years without fuss. Late in life, he developed something of a May-December romance with Lola, a sweet street cat that I adopted from the streets of Viejo San Juan, and the two would snuggle and snooze together.

Hastings also had a highly developed emotional sensitivity which I found unique among the animals I have know, and an uncanny habit of looking you right in the eye with his piercing green-hued gaze. The right animal can open up extraordinary depths of emotion in a person, perhaps, especially, when one leads the kind of non-conventional, roaming lifestyle that I have over the years, and Hastings opened up a lot of love in me. Virtually every night for the last 14 years, he would snuggled up next to the left side of my head and the last sound I would hear before I fell asleep would be him purring. Many times over the years, at the moments when the weight of life and its troubles would seem too much to bear and I would sit at my desk wondering what the path forward was and if there even was one, I would feel a paw on my arm and look down to see Hastings there, eyes full of love and concern, as if to say “It will be ok, Dad. We’ll get through this.”

Hastings was also a link between a time of relative youth and optimism - I was 37 when I got him - and what came afterward, when things got very hard and - with some euphoric intervals - more or less stayed that way. He was at my side through it all. It is often said that rescue cats end up rescuing those who rescued them and nowhere was this more true than with Hastings and I.

Today, Hastings, the patriarch and paterfamilias of the Deibert animal clan, departed this mortal realm. Coming almost and only four months to the day of the departure of my beloved beagle Max, this has certainly marked 2024 as a year of great loss for me. But maybe Hastings and Max are preparing the path for my own inevitable crossing to the other side, so I won’t be so alone once I get there.

Ernest Hemingway (who also loved cats and accurately observed “one cat just leads to another”) once wrote his heaven was “a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in." I’ve had very clear visions of mine in recent months: A tropical lagoon with a house full of all my books and a desk looking out onto the water where Max and I splash throughout the day and Hastings, Winston and my other cats lounge in the shade or climb up the curving coconut palms. 

When Abigail Adams died in 1818, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend and erstwhile political rival John Adams that  “the term is not very distant at which we are to deposit, in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved & lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again.”

You were my rock, Hastings, and I owe you so much. Thanks for your loyalty in all the years we had together. I love you and I look forward to the time when I see you again.