Väinämöinen, my boy Vai, died this morning

He’s gone now.

Pretty sudden… a heart attack…?… he was perched on top of me this morning, as he often did, and visited me in the bathroom, bumping up against me this morning as I was getting ready for work… and then went into my room, & I heard a weird miaow, like he makes sometimes when he’s being silly, & I looked in & he was lying on the bed in a silly cat-drama way, or so I thought, and I went to give him some love, and he was just twitching a bit… possibly aware I was there… & then his life left him. I loved him so much.

The rest of this post is a reprise of one I wrote about him in early 2010.  There’s more about his namesake, the Finnish epic hero Väinämöinen, here.

Rest in peace, my sweet fuzzy-wuzz.

I’m too tired to write much, so I’ll make this a cat post instead.

Väinämöinen, or Vai for short, was named after the Väinämöinen of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, who was a creator figure & a tietäjä, or man of knowledge — the Finnish word for what in Siberian cultures would be called a shaman.

This painting is called “The Defense of the Sampo” by the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela. Väinämöinen is the whitebearded guy on the left.

Vaistache

Adamastache

This Väinämöinen is a really cool cat. He also has the power to occasionally & temporarily give me a really fat porno mustache so that I bear an uncanny resemblance to Admiral Adama at the beginning of Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. Don’tcha think?

Like all cats, he likes hanging out in weird places that he doesn’t consider weird at all, like my laundry basket.

He also enjoys the back of my couch. Here, he was watching me sitting at my computer desk.

He finds it irritating when the dog looks at him. Sweetheart continually fails to understand that it is blasphemy for a mere Evil Dog from Hell to gaze upon the countenance, or even just the back fur, of His Lordship. That’s what was happening in this shot.

Here’s a slideshow of all the photos of him I’ve uploaded to my Flickr photostream.