The Rainbow Bridge

If you found this page tonight because your dog or cat just died, I'm sorry. You don't have to do anything yet. The poem you're looking for is below. So is the story of the young woman who wrote it for her own dog, in 1959, the day after he died in her arms. And below that, a few small things that might help, when nothing seems to.

You don't have to read all of it. You don't have to read any of it. It's all here.

There is a small piece of writing — most people call it a poem, though Edna, who wrote it, didn't really intend it as one — that has reached more grieving pet owners than any other piece of writing in the world.

It describes a meadow, just on the near side of heaven. The pets we have loved go there when they die. They are restored to health. The old ones run again. The hurt ones are made whole. They wait in the meadow, content, except for one small ache: each of them misses the person they had to leave behind. And then one day, that person finally arrives. The pet looks up. There is no question of recognition. They are reunited, and together they cross the bridge into whatever is beyond.

That is the picture the writing leaves behind.

It belongs to no religion in particular. It does not require you to believe anything. It is simply a way of saying that the love did not end, and that they are not nowhere.

For some readers, that is enough. For others, it is too much, or not enough. Both are fine. Grief is allowed to refuse comfort that doesn't fit. Grief is also allowed to take comfort wherever it can find it.

For most of the poem's life, no one knew who had written it. Veterinary hospitals printed it on cards. Hospices read it at services. Dear Abby published it in 1994 in a syndicated column read by 100 million people. Every copy said Author Unknown.

It turned out the author was a 19-year-old Scottish girl, writing the day after her first dog died.

Her name was Edna Clyne. Today she is Edna Clyne-Rekhy. In 1959 she was living in Inverness, Scotland, with her family and her Labrador, Major. He was the first dog that had been hers alone. She used to talk to him for hours, she has said, and felt he understood every word.

He died in her arms.

The next morning, her mother — watching her daughter break apart — told her to try writing it down. Edna found a notebook nearby and ripped out a page. She didn't realize it was her sister's notebook, and that her sister had already written on the other side. She erased what she could of her sister's words. Then she filled the rest with her own, until the page was full. She remembers it feeling as if Major himself were guiding her hand.

When she was done, she turned the page over and wrote two words at the top: Rainbow Bridge.

She showed it to her mother, who cried. She showed it to a few friends, who asked for copies. She typed out a handful of duplicates by hand. She didn't put her name on any of them — it was, she said, something private between her and Major. She didn't think anyone outside her circle of friends would care.

Over the next 35 years, those typed copies traveled. Friend to friend. Vet to grieving owner. Hospice to hospice. Edna's name fell off somewhere along the way. By the time Dear Abby printed it in 1994, no one knew where the words had come from. The poem had become a kind of folk song — owned by everyone, attributed to no one.

Edna had no idea any of this was happening. She had married Jack Rekhy, lived for years in India where Jack worked as a physician, then in Spain, where they ran an olive farm and she rescued an injured dog she named Zanussi, after the washing machine he was hiding inside. They came back to Scotland. Jack developed Alzheimer's. He died.

Then in January 2023, an art historian named Paul Koudounaris, who had spent decades trying to find the author, finally tracked her down. He called her. He asked her if she was the one who had written the Rainbow Bridge.

She said: “How on Earth did you find me?”

She had no idea, until that phone call, that her words had been read by millions of people in their worst hours. She is, today, in her eighties, living quietly in Inverness, still writing, still surrounded by dogs.

She gave the world a small piece of language that has helped more people than she will ever know. She did it the day after she lost her first dog. She did it because her mother told her to try.

We won't reproduce the poem in full here. Edna is its rightful author and the question of how it should be shared belongs to her and her family, not to us. The fullest authoritative source is the National Geographic article that broke the story in February 2023, and Paul Koudounaris's longer essay through The Order of the Good Death.

What we can tell you, in our own words, is what the poem says:

There is a place. The pets we have lost are there. They are well again. They run, eat, are warm, are content. They are not gone. They are simply waiting. They miss us the same way we miss them. And one day — not today, not tomorrow, but eventually, in whatever form eventually takes — we will see them again. They will look up. They will know us instantly. We will not need to explain anything. And we will go on together.

About 200 words in the original. Two sides of a sheet of notebook paper. A 19-year-old girl writing the day after her dog died.

That is part of why it has worked, for 65 years now, on so many people: it doesn't try.

Sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes you read it and the meadow feels too clean for the kind of mess you're in. Sometimes the idea of a reunion feels like a lie someone is trying to sell you. Sometimes you don't believe in any of it, and the poem feels like cold comfort wrapped in soft language.

That is allowed. That is normal.

A grief counselor named Marty Tousley, who has been writing about pet loss for 40 years, makes the point that no comfort is universal. What helps one person feels false to another. The reader gets to decide. If the Rainbow Bridge poem doesn't fit you, set it down. Plenty of people who loved their pets just as much as anyone else have never found it useful, and they grieve, and they heal, in their own way.

You are also allowed to find it helpful one day and not helpful the next. Grief moves. The thing that comforted you on day three may feel like noise on day twelve. Then it might come back to you on day forty.

After a pet dies, many people carry a quiet shame about what they're feeling. Not just the grief — the texture of it. The specifics that don't seem to belong in a normal grief.

Some of these are common. None of them are wrong:

You may feel more wrecked than you did when a relative died. This is not a moral failing. Your pet was woven into every hour of your day. The bond was different — not less, just different.

You may feel relief along with the sadness, especially after a long illness. Relief that they are not suffering. Relief that the daily work of caring for a dying animal is over. The relief is not betrayal. It is love finishing its job.

You may feel furious at the vet, or at yourself, or at God, or at no one in particular. You may replay the last week looking for what you missed. This is what minds do when something this big happens. It will quiet down. Slowly.

You may feel jealous of strangers walking healthy dogs in the park. This is not crazy. It is the most ordinary human reaction to loss.

You may feel like you can't tell anyone how bad this is, because they won't get it. Some of them won't. The phrase Marty Tousley uses for this is disenfranchised grief — grief that the surrounding world doesn't quite recognize as legitimate. Pet grief has been disenfranchised for a long time. It is becoming less so, slowly. But on a Tuesday afternoon at work, surrounded by people who didn't know your dog, it can still feel very lonely.

None of what you are feeling is too much. None of it is too little. None of it means there was something wrong with how much you loved them.

You don't have to do anything tonight. That is the most honest sentence on this page.

If you want to do something, here are a few small things people have found useful:

Light a candle. Not for any religious reason. Just so the house has a small warm point in it. Sit with it for a few minutes.

Look at one photo. Just one. Not the whole camera roll. One. Let yourself cry if you want to. Don't, if you don't.

Write down one specific thing. The way they tilted their head when you used a particular word. The spot they always claimed on the couch. One concrete thing. Not a eulogy. One sentence.

Make a small image. This is what we made. If you'd like, you can use a free tool we built to take one photo of your pet and turn it into a simple memorial image you can keep, share, or print. It takes about a minute. There is no pressure to use it. It is one option among many.

Make a memorial for your pet →

You don't need a memorial for your love to count. You don't need anything for your love to count.

If you'd like the longer story of how the Rainbow Bridge poem was written, we have a fuller page on Edna and Major with the details Paul Koudounaris uncovered in 2023.

If your dog has just died, the dog-specific version of the poem and how to share it is here.

If you want a shorter version that fits on a card, it's here.

We're slowly building more pages — for cats, for the wider collection of pet loss poems, and for sympathy cards. They'll go up over the coming weeks. If you'd like to be told when they're ready, email hello@rainbow.memorial and just say “tell me when.”