Mindelund

The Rainbow Bridge poem and its true author

By A. Monk · Updated

For more than sixty years, a short piece of writing has travelled from hand to hand, comforting people who have lost a pet. It was passed on so many times that it lost the one thing it should never have lost: the name of the woman who wrote it.

What is the Rainbow Bridge?

The Rainbow Bridge describes a green meadow just this side of heaven. Animals who have died arrive there restored — whole again, free of pain, running and playing in the sun. They are happy, but one thing is missing: the person they left behind. When that person's own time comes, the animal lifts its head, catches a familiar scent, and runs. They cross the bridge together, and are not parted again.

That is the whole of it. A meadow, a wait, a reunion. It is not a doctrine and it asks nobody to believe anything. It simply gives grief a shape it can hold.

Who wrote the Rainbow Bridge poem?

Edna Clyne-Rekhy, a Scottish artist and animal lover, wrote it in 1959, when she was nineteen years old.

Her Labrador, Major, had just died. Sitting in her family's lounge near Inverness, she began on a blank white sheet with the line that millions of people would one day recognise:

"Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge."

The rest, she has said, poured out of her. She filled the front of the page and then the back. She considered it private, and kept it to herself.

How it lost her name

Eventually she typed out copies for friends who had lost animals of their own. Those friends were moved, and passed them on. The copies carried no name.

From there it spread the way such things do — through rescue newsletters, through grief support groups, and by the early 1990s through the internet. In 1994 the widely syndicated advice column Dear Abby printed it in full, unattributed. By then it belonged to everyone and to no one.

How the author was found

The art historian Paul Koudounaris, who had spent a decade researching pet cemeteries, kept meeting the Rainbow Bridge in his work and wanted to know where it came from.

He found fifteen separate copyright claims filed on the title with the US Copyright Office from 1995 onwards, and assembled a list of roughly twenty-five names with some connection to the text. One by one he investigated them, and one by one he ruled them out — until one name remained.

He traced Edna Clyne-Rekhy from a stray third-hand mention online. She was 82. She still had the original handwritten manuscript. Koudounaris published his findings on 9 February 2023, and National Geographic confirmed the account on 22 February 2023 — sixty-four years after she first set the words down.

Is it a poem or a story?

Strictly, Edna Clyne-Rekhy wrote prose, not verse. The rhyming six-stanza poem that also circulates under the name "Rainbow Bridge" is a separate, later work by different authors. Most people meet the prose version and simply call it a poem, which is why you will see both descriptions used.

Why we do not reprint the full text here

You will find the complete text on many websites. We have chosen not to reproduce it.

Edna Clyne-Rekhy is its author. She never placed it in the public domain, and for six decades her work circulated without her name attached to it. An article about giving her that name back is not the place to copy her words out again without asking. We have quoted the opening line, described what the text does, and pointed you to the sources below.

Older than 1959

The idea of a paradise where animals wait did not begin with her, and she never claimed it did. Norse myth has Bifröst, the rainbow bridge between worlds. Margaret Marshall Saunders' 1902 book Beautiful Joe's Paradise imagined a green land where animals recover from cruelty — though there they arrive by balloon, not across a bridge.

What Edna Clyne-Rekhy gave the idea was its plainness. A nineteen-year-old wrote down, without ornament, exactly what she needed to be true.

A place to remember

Grief looks for somewhere to go. For most of human history that place has been physical — a stone, a tree, a name carved somewhere. Animals have rarely been given one.

If you are living through this now, we have written about what it is like to lose a pet, and about why a digital memorial can help. And if you would like a place of your own, you are welcome to plant a memory in mindelund and light a candle for your friend. It stays where you left it.

Sources