The Rainbow Bridge: the story behind the poem

The poem describes a green meadow “just this side of heaven,” connected to it by a bridge of rainbow light. Animals who were old or ill are young and whole again there; they run and play together, warm and fed and safe. But each of them is waiting. And one day a pet stops mid-play and stares down the path — because you have arrived. The reunion, the poem promises, is never-to-be-parted: you cross the bridge together.

That is the whole of it, and that is exactly why it works. In a few plain sentences it grants the three things pet grief aches for most: that the suffering of the final days is undone, that the parting is a pause rather than an ending, and that the love ran both ways — they are waiting for you, specifically, the way they waited at the door in life.

For some sixty years the poem circulated with the byline “author unknown.” It spread through grief support groups and newspaper columns in the early 1990s, then across the early internet, attributed to no one — or to several claimants nobody could verify.

The mystery was solved only in 2023, when researcher Paul Koudounaris traced the text to Edna Clyne-Rekhy, a Scottish woman who wrote it in 1959, at nineteen years old, the day after her Labrador, Major, died. She wrote it by hand on a notepad, crying as she went, and later said the words simply poured out of her. She shared typed copies with a few friends over the years — never with her name on them — and had no idea her private consolation had become perhaps the most widely shared piece of mourning literature in the world until she was found, in her eighties, with the original handwritten pages still in her keeping. Handwriting and early copies confirmed the attribution, and the discovery made headlines internationally.

There is something fitting in the truth: the words that have carried millions of people through pet loss were not composed for publication. They were one grieving teenager’s love for one particular dog — which is, of course, exactly what every reader brings to them.

People of every faith and none reach for this poem, which tells you it is doing something deeper than theology. A few reasons it has endured:

• It restores them first. Grief’s cruelest habit is replaying the ending — the illness, the thinness, the last visit. The poem’s first move is to undo that: young again, whole again, running. It hands you back the memory of your pet at their best.
• It reframes goodbye as “until.” Whether taken as literal hope or as pure metaphor, “waiting” is a gentler shape for absence than “gone,” and hearts navigate by shapes, not doctrines.
• It says the bond was mutual. The animal in the meadow is not merely happy — they are watching the path. For an owner haunted by “did they know how much I loved them,” that image answers the question.
• It echoes something old. A rainbow as the road between worlds appears in mythologies far older than the poem — travelers between earth and sky have crossed such bridges in stories for a very long time. Edna said she simply wrote what came; what came happens to rhyme with something humans have always believed about rainbows.

The poem has even given pet loss its own date: August 28 is marked by many as Rainbow Bridge Remembrance Day, a day for sharing photos and stories of the animals we’ve loved and lost. If you have a pet on the other side of the bridge, it is a gentle occasion to light a candle, revisit the photos, or tell one story about them out loud to someone who never got to meet them.

The Rainbow Bridge lives in the imagination; grief also wants somewhere real to visit. Many people pair the poem with a place to remember — a stone in the garden, a framed photo, or a memorial page where their story is told, their photos live, and anyone who loved them can light a candle or leave a memory, on Remembrance Day and on all the ordinary days too. More ways to remember them: pet memorial ideas. And if the loss is fresh, our guide on coping with pet loss is a warm place to start.