Who Wrote the Rainbow Bridge Poem?

For 64 years, no one knew. The veterinary hospitals printed it on cards. The hospices read it at services. Dear Abby published it to 100 million readers in 1994. 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 is Edna Clyne-Rekhy. She is in her eighties now, living in Inverness, Scotland. She had no idea, until 2023, that her words had reached millions of grieving pet owners. This is her story.

Edna Clyne was 19 years old. She lived with her family near Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands. She had a Labrador named Major.

He was the first dog that had been hers alone. Not a family dog. Hers.

She used to talk to him for hours, she has said. She felt he understood every word. Her mother used to ask how Edna had trained him to be so gentle and obedient. Edna laughed. She had never trained him at all. It was natural between them.

He died in her arms.

The next morning, she was, in her own words, “just crying and crying.” Her mother asked her what was wrong.

“It's Major,” Edna said. “I can't put away this soreness.”

Her mother told her: maybe write down how you're feeling.

Edna sat in the family lounge. She found a notebook nearby. She didn't realize it was her sister's notebook, and that her sister had already written on the other side of the page. She erased what she could of her sister's words.

Then she filled the page with her own.

The first line came to her without thinking: Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge.

She remembers it feeling as if Major himself were guiding her hand. She didn't know it was a poem. She thought she was just talking to him. She filled the front of the page, then the back. About 200 words. Two sides of a sheet of notebook paper.

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

That was the only title.

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 did not put her name on any of them.

It was, she said, something private between her and Major. She did not think anyone outside her circle of friends would ever read it.

Then she put the original away.

Over the next 35 years, those typed copies passed friend to friend. Then friend to vet. Then vet to grieving owner. Then hospice to hospice. Names fell off as the page was photocopied and re-photocopied.

By the time it reached Dear Abby in February 1994, no one knew who had written it.

A reader in Grand Rapids, Michigan had been given a copy by their local humane society. They sent it to the syndicated advice columnist Abigail Van Buren, with a note: “If you print this, you had better warn your readers to get out their hankies.” Dear Abby did print it. She admitted to crying herself. She also asked her 100 million readers if anyone could verify who the author was.

No one came forward. After that, the Rainbow Bridge seemed to be everywhere — pet cemeteries, sympathy cards, online forums, condolence letters.

Edna had no idea any of this was happening.

She had married Jack Rekhy. They had moved to India, where Jack worked as a physician — they lived in Agra, fifteen minutes from the Taj Mahal, and Edna rescued street dogs. Then they moved to Spain and ran an olive farm. Edna kept rescuing dogs there, including a young Andalusian Podenco she found hiding inside a washing machine, badly injured, having been beaten by another farmer. She named him Zanussi, after the brand of the washing machine.

Then Jack developed Alzheimer's. They came back to Scotland. He died.

An art historian in Tucson, Arizona, named Paul Koudounaris, had spent more than a decade trying to find the author of the Rainbow Bridge.

He had been writing a book about pet cemeteries. He kept running into the poem. It bothered him that a piece of writing of such “monumental importance to the world of animal mourning” was uncredited.

Starting in 1995, he found 15 separate copyright claims filed under the title Rainbow Bridge with the United States Copyright Office. He compiled a list of about 25 names. He looked into each one and crossed them off.

Eventually, only one name was left. He had found it through a stray third-hand reference in an online chat group — someone had mentioned an Edna “Clyde” from Scotland who supposedly wrote the poem. The name was slightly wrong, but a Google search led him to Edna Clyne-Rekhy. She had written a book about her late husband and their dog. She was the only woman on his list and the only non-American.

He called her in January 2023 and asked: did you write 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 had thought it was something private between her and Major.

Koudounaris later said that when she showed him the original handwritten draft — the one with her sister's writing erased on the back — he knew immediately it was real. He could not fully explain the power of those sheets.

Edna is in her eighties. She still lives in Inverness. She still writes. She is still surrounded by dogs.

When the journalist who interviewed her for Slate magazine in late 2023 asked about Major, sixty-four years after he died, Edna cried.

She told the journalist she still talks to Major sometimes.

In an interview with National Geographic, when asked what she would say to the millions of people her words have reached, she said: “I really can't believe it. I'm just this widow who enjoys writing and friends coming over and teaching people to recycle. I never thought for a minute that this would happen.”

She has asked, gently, that people who feel moved by her writing consider donating to Alzheimer's research, in memory of Jack.

Edna did not write the Rainbow Bridge to comfort the world. She wrote it because her mother told her to try. She did it the day after she lost her first dog.

She did not put her name on it because she did not think it was important. She thought it was something private.

Sixty-four years later, that small private act has reached more grieving pet owners than any other piece of writing in the English language.

There is something honest in that. The thing that helped the most people was made by someone who was not trying to help anyone — only herself, on the worst day of her young life. The fact that it traveled at all is because friends, and vets, and one Michigan reader, kept passing it on.

If your dog or cat has just died, and you are reading this in the middle of the night, you are part of that line. Sixty-four years of grieving people, passing one girl's notebook page from hand to hand, because it helped.

It might help you, too. It might not. Both are fine.

If you want to read the original poem in Edna's own words, the most accurate published version is in Paul Koudounaris's essay through The Order of the Good Death, or Natasha Daly's reporting in National Geographic from February 2023. Both are worth your time.

For the broader context of what the Rainbow Bridge has meant to grieving pet owners over six decades, our main page on the Rainbow Bridge walks through the poem itself and what to do tonight, when yours has just died.

If you want to do something to honor Edna's wish: the Alzheimer's Foundation of America accepts donations in memory of Jack Rekhy.