When someone’s dog or cat dies now, you rarely read the word “died.” You read that they “crossed the Rainbow Bridge.” The phrase has slipped so completely into the language of pet loss, on Instagram tributes, on pet-cemetery headstones, on the printed sheet a vet’s office might hand you after a euthanasia, that it feels like something ancient, a folk belief passed down for centuries.
It isn’t. The Rainbow Bridge is a strikingly modern invention, and it has a single, identifiable author. Almost nobody who reaches for its comfort knows that the whole idea was written by one grieving teenager in Scotland in 1959, or that its author didn’t learn how far her words had traveled until she was in her eighties. And oddly, understanding just how human and recent the story is doesn’t puncture the comfort. It explains it.
A poem, not a legend
No one reading this actually pictures a real rainbow arcing over the clouds with a pot of gold waiting at the far end. So where did the image come from?
In 1959, a 19-year-old named Edna Clyne lost her first dog, Major. She was devastated, and, grieving, she sat down and wrote a poem she called “The Rainbow Bridge.” It opens with a place just this side of heaven, where every animal that dies arrives to find meadows and hills to run and play in. In the poem, animals who had grown old or sick are restored to health and vigor; they’re happy and content, wanting for nothing except the people they left behind. And it promises the part that does the real work on a grieving reader: your pet is waiting, and one day you will meet again and cross the bridge together, never to be separated.
Clyne printed her words out and handed them to friends who were mourning their own animals, as a small, homemade reassurance that they would see their pets again. From there the poem did what a good piece of comfort does. It circulated, copied and passed hand to hand, uncredited, around the world.
The leap into the mainstream came through, of all things, an advice column. In 1994, decades before social-media grief grids, a reader signing off as “An Old Softy” mailed the Rainbow Bridge poem to Dear Abby, the syndicated column then written by Pauline Phillips and her daughter Jeanne. The columnist admitted the poem made her cry and predicted, correctly, that a lot of readers would be moved by it too. It ran in papers across the country, and the phrase entered the culture for good.
For years, though, nobody knew who had written it. That blank finally got filled in 2023, when the art historian and author Paul Koudounaris, working through The Order of the Good Death, tracked the poem back to Clyne, by then Edna Clyne-Rekhy and 82 years old. She told National Geographic she’d never realized how far the poem had traveled, and said she was stunned. Sixty-some years after a heartbroken teenager wrote a few lines about her dog, she found out she’d quietly authored one of the most widely shared pieces of comfort in the English-speaking world.
Why a made-up metaphor actually helps
It’s fair to wonder how a poem everyone knows is a metaphor can genuinely soothe grief. The answer has less to do with belief in an afterlife than with permission.
E.B. Bartels, who interviewed dozens of grieving pet owners for her book Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter, found that the Rainbow Bridge surfaced even among people she’d have guessed were too skeptical or unsentimental for it. What kept coming up, she noticed, was less a literal conviction than a wish: the appealing idea that a beloved animal is somewhere, waiting, and that the reunion people hope for with any other loved one might extend to their pets too. For a lot of mourners, the story simply gives their love somewhere to go.
Bartels, whose own dog Seymour died, also points to the shame that can shadow pet grief. People worry it’s excessive to fall apart over an animal, especially if they’ve lost human family members. But pets are family, she argues, and anyone who has lived closely with an animal knows they have distinct personalities of their own. A framework like the Rainbow Bridge quietly validates that the loss is real and worth mourning.
That squares with what grief specialists told her: grief is grief. The mind doesn’t neatly rank whom it’s allowed to mourn. In fact, being wrecked over a dog or cat often reopens older losses, a grandparent, a friend, a childhood pet, because the machinery of mourning is the same regardless of the species involved. Which suggests the thing people sometimes feel embarrassed about, the depth of their pet grief, isn’t a sign that something’s wrong with them. It’s a sign the bond was genuine.
The animal behaviorist Karen London makes a related point from the other direction: she loves the image precisely because of what it does for the living. The picture of a dog waiting in a beautiful place, in good company, anticipating the next hello, has helped countless clients and friends of hers carry an unbearable goodbye. The comfort isn’t in proving the bridge is real. It’s in having somewhere to put the hope.
The bridge is also, it turns out, real
Here’s the twist that closes the loop. For a long time the Rainbow Bridge was strictly an idea. Increasingly, it’s a place you can actually visit.
In Torrington, Connecticut, there’s a physical Rainbow Bridge, painted and tended by the local community, where people leave tributes to the pets they’ve lost. Bartels has talked about making a pilgrimage of her own to Dog Mountain in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, a hillside chapel papered wall to wall with photos and notes honoring departed dogs, where she planned to add a memorial to Seymour. Both are versions of the same instinct: a spot in the tangible world to hold an intangible grief.
You don’t need to drive to Vermont to build one, though. The “bridge” can be anything that reconnects you to the animal you miss, a clay imprint of a paw, a framed photo, a small garden corner, a spot on a beach. The point of the Rainbow Bridge was never the geography. It was giving love a destination.
That’s really why a teenager’s 1959 poem still circulates. It doesn’t ask you to believe anything in particular. It just offers the same thing Edna Clyne offered her grieving friends more than sixty years ago: the idea that the animal you loved is somewhere good, waiting, and that the goodbye might not be the end of the story.
