The Rainbow Bridge, and what it is for

The idea

You know it even if you have never read it to the end. Just this side of wherever we go, there is a meadow. The animals who were loved wait there, young again, whole again, running with each other, until the day their person arrives. Then the two of them cross the bridge together. That is the whole of it, and it has comforted more people than almost anything else written about animals.

Who wrote it

For decades the words traveled with no name on them, photocopied on vet clinic counters and later passed around the early internet as author unknown. In 2023, after a long search by an art historian, the poem was traced to Edna Clyne-Rekhy, a Scottish woman who wrote it in 1959, when she was nineteen, on the day after her Labrador, Major, died. She wrote it for herself, on a sheet of paper, and did not think of it as a poem. She shared it with a few friends, and the copies never stopped. The keeper does not reprint the words here, because they are hers; you will find them easily, and they are better read in her name.

What it does

It gives grief a direction. The hardest part of losing an animal is that they cannot be told where you went, and you cannot be told where they did. The bridge answers both at once: they are somewhere, they are well, and it is not over. Whether you believe it as a place or hold it as a picture, it does the same work. It lets you stop bracing.

The keeper's view

People sometimes ask whether the meadow is the meadow in the poem. It is not, and the keeper would not claim it. She does not say where they go. She keeps where they were: the photographs, the story, the name on a stone that stays. If the bridge is where they are now, then a plot here is the place on this side of it where the people who loved them can still come and sit. The two ideas get along.

A Rainbow Bridge memorial that lasts

• A plot in the meadow. Ours, so read it knowing that. Their photographs and their story at a permanent address, free and never deleted, where anyone who loved them can leave a flower or light a candle. Write in the story that they are waiting at the bridge, if that is what you believe; the story holds unlimited words. Plant a plot.
• The poem, printed and framed, with their photograph beside it and Edna Clyne-Rekhy's name under it. A shelf like this becomes a small shrine; the keeper has a note on making one.
• A rainbow in the garden. A row of perennials in seven colors where they lay in the sun. It comes back every year, which is the point.
• A suncatcher in their window. On bright afternoons it throws a small rainbow across the floor where they used to sleep. Children especially love this one.
• A card to the family, with the pet's name and one true memory. If your own words will not come, borrow older ones.
• Their days. The bridge is a story about waiting, so mark the time: their gotcha day and the day they left. On a tended plot the keeper lights their candle every year on those days for you. The office explains tending.

The keeper's lines

Written here, for families who wanted something of their own beside the old words:

If the bridge is the picture that helps, keep it. If it is not, keep the meadow, which asks you to believe only that they were here and that they mattered. Make a place for them, or take the walk first.