Mindelund

Rainbow Bridge Remembrance Day: how to honour your pet on 28 August

By A. Monk · Updated

Once a year, on 28 August, people who have lost an animal set aside a little time to remember them on purpose. Not to grieve harder — to remember out loud, together, and without apology.

What is Rainbow Bridge Remembrance Day?

It was created by the American author Deborah Barnes in 2015. Two years earlier, on 28 August 2013, she had said goodbye to her ragdoll cat, Mr. Jazz. She wrote about that loss in her book Purr Prints of the Heart, told in Mr. Jazz's own voice, and then set up a simple page where anyone could post a photograph, a memory, a few lines of their own on that date.

Her intention was specific, and worth repeating. She did not want a day of sadness. She wanted a celebration — a time to remember the animals we have lost with love, rather than only with grief.

The name comes from the Rainbow Bridge, the piece of writing that has comforted more grieving pet owners than any other. If you do not know where it came from, that story is worth an evening: it was written in 1959 by a nineteen-year-old Scottish girl, and it took sixty-four years for her name to come back to it.

When is it, exactly?

28 August, every year. In 2026 that falls on a Friday.

Two other dates you may come across, if you would rather mark a different one:

  • National Pet Memorial Day — the second Sunday in September (13 September 2026). The oldest of the three: established in 1972 by the International Association of Pet Cemeteries and Crematories.
  • World Pet Memorial Day — the second Tuesday in June (9 June 2026).

None of them is more correct than the others. If your animal died in March, mark March. A date only matters because you decided it does.

Nine ways to mark the day

None of these need to be large. Grief does not require a production.

  • Say the name out loud. To someone who knew them, or to no one. Names go quiet quickly after a death, and it is a strange, specific loss.
  • Light a candle. At home, or on a memorial where others can see it burning.
  • Cook what they begged for. It is not silly. The body remembers things the mind talks itself out of.
  • Walk the old route. All of it, at the usual pace, at the usual hour.
  • Write them a letter. Not a eulogy — a letter. Tell them what has happened since.
  • Find the photographs you never printed. Print one. Put it somewhere you will pass it.
  • Do something for an animal still living. A donation, a shelter shift, a bag of food. Grief moves better when it is pointed outwards.
  • Sit with someone else's loss. Read what strangers wrote about their animals. Light a candle for one of them.
  • Let the children take part. A drawing, a stone with a name on it, a sentence said at the table. Children do better with a small ritual than with a vague reassurance.

If the first one is coming

The first 28 August after a death is not like the others. Neither is the first birthday, or the first empty morning of the walk that no longer happens.

You do not have to mark it. If you would rather let the day pass unnamed, let it pass. Anniversaries have no authority over you. And if it arrives and knocks you flat despite your plans, that is not a failure — that is what grief for an animal does, and it is not a sign that something has gone wrong with you.

A place that is there on the other 364 days

The trouble with a remembrance day is that it comes once. The missing does not keep to the calendar.

That is the quiet argument for having somewhere permanent — a name, the dates, a few sentences, somewhere you can go at three in the morning in November. You are welcome to plant a memory for your animal in mindelund and light a candle. On 28 August, and on any of the other days.

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