Do You Know Where the Rainbow Bridge Came From?
The true story of Edna Clyne-Rekhy, her Labrador Major, and the words that travelled around the world without her name
I knew what the Rainbow Bridge meant long before I knew where it came from. Most people who have loved and lost an animal probably do. The words arrive when there isn’t much useful left to say—in a card from the veterinarian, beneath a photograph shared online, or quietly from somebody who understands why the empty bed in the corner is not just an empty bed. I heard them after Sassy, who had been part of our home since 2010, and again after Tanner died at home this August, only a few months short of seventeen. Grief has a way of making a house sound the same.
What finally struck me was how completely I had accepted the Rainbow Bridge without ever wondering who built it. It felt ancient, or at least old enough that its beginning had disappeared—perhaps part of a religious tradition or folklore passed between generations of people who had stood in the same awful rooms and made the same final decisions. The phrase was so familiar that I had stopped hearing it as something a person must once have imagined for the very first time.
When I went looking for that person, the trail became crowded in a hurry. A grief counsellor was credited here, a pet-loss specialist there. One version was attributed to a Native American shaman, while other explanations reached toward Norse mythology, the Bible and practically any tradition containing a bridge, a rainbow or an afterlife. The Rainbow Bridge had spent decades listed as anonymous, which seems to have encouraged a remarkable number of people to remember writing it.
The earliest evidence takes us to a house near Inverness, Scotland, in 1959, where a nineteen-year-old woman named Edna Clyne held her Labrador Retriever, Major, as he died.
The dog who was hers
Edna’s family had lived with other dogs, but Major was the first one she could call her own. Edna remembered talking to him and feeling that he understood every word. Her mother sometimes asked how she had trained him to be so gentle and obedient. Edna said their understanding had come naturally.
I understand what she meant. You live with a dog long enough and eventually he knows when you’re leaving, when you’re staying and when you don’t need him to do anything except be there. Nobody has to explain that kind of relationship to somebody who has had it.
Major died in her arms in 1959. The next day she was still crying and told her mother she couldn’t put away the pain, “this soreness,” as she would describe it more than sixty years later. Her mother suggested she write down what she was feeling. So Edna sat in the family lounge, took a sheet of notebook paper and began: “Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge.”
She filled the front of the page and turned it over, only to discover that in her haste she had taken a sheet from her sister’s notebook and there was already writing on the back. Edna crossed out her sister’s words and carried on. It is such an ordinary, believable detail: no polished desk, no solemn literary ritual, just a heartbroken young woman who had grabbed the wrong piece of paper and wasn’t about to stop because her sister had got there first.
On that page, Edna gave Major back everything death had taken. Animals who had been old, ill or injured became healthy again. They ran together in green fields with food, water and sunshine, content except for the person each had left behind. Then one day an animal would stop, look into the distance and run toward the person they had been waiting for. They would meet, hold one another and cross the bridge together, never to be separated again.
The reunion was central to what Edna imagined. Major would be healthy and able to run again, yet the bond between them would remain; he would still know her and wait for the day they could continue together.
Edna showed the page to her mother and a few people close to her, then put it away. Her husband later encouraged her to publish it, but she refused because it felt private, something between Major and her. She did agree to type copies for friends who were moved by it, one at a time, and she left her name off them. She had no reason to imagine that this small act of sharing would send her private grief out into the world while leaving her behind.
The words leave home
There is a long stretch of this story that nobody has been able to recover. We don’t know which friend copied Edna’s words again, who carried them beyond Scotland or how they eventually reached animal-rescue circles in North America. The path is plausible, but plausibility is not proof, and the missing years should remain missing until somebody finds the paper trail.
The trail becomes visible on January 7, 1993, when a complete version was posted to the rec.pets.dogs internet newsgroup. The person sharing it said it had appeared in the Mid-Atlantic Great Dane Rescue League newsletter, which had reprinted it from the Akita Rescue Society of America. That places the Rainbow Bridge inside breed-rescue communities before most households had any idea what an internet newsgroup was.
None of that surprised me. Rescue people had the words, somebody knew another person who needed them, and along they went. That is how these things travelled before sharing meant pressing a button.
By then, Edna’s words had changed. The new version began with a bridge “connecting Heaven and Earth” and added warm spring weather, twitching noses, raised ears and animals who had been “maimed” becoming whole again. Its structure followed Edna’s vision through restoration, waiting, recognition, reunion and the final crossing, with decades of human handling visible in the changed language.
We tend to think of a text as fixed because today copying it requires two clicks. Edna’s copies travelled in another world. They were typed, mailed, read aloud, placed in newsletters and typed again. A person remembered a phrase differently; another improved what they thought was an awkward sentence; somebody changed a pronoun or added the detail that had comforted them most. Every act of consolation allowed the wording to move a little farther from the page in Edna’s drawer.
Then the Rainbow Bridge reached Dear Abby. In February 1994, a reader from Grand Rapids sent the piece to the syndicated advice column after receiving it from a local humane society, warning that Abby’s audience might need their handkerchiefs. Abby printed it, admitted shedding a tear or two herself and asked whether anyone could identify the author. Nobody could. The column nevertheless placed those unattributed words before an audience reported at roughly 100 million readers, accelerating their spread through popular culture.
The problem with an empty byline
By then, the authorship trail was a mess. Paul Koudounaris, the historian who finally traced the poem back to Edna, found roughly twenty-five names connected with possible authorship and fifteen United States copyright claims under the title “Rainbow Bridge” within five years of the Dear Abby column. Those filings show what people submitted in the 1990s. Edna’s handwritten manuscript is dated decades earlier.
The names still repeated online include Oregon grief counsellor Paul C. Dahm, who is said to have written a version in 1981; Wallace Sife, founder of the Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement, who wrote about animals waiting for us in heaven; and Steve and Diane Bodofsky, who created a later rhyming Rainbow Bridge poem. Their work is part of the larger history of how we learned to speak openly about pet loss, and the Bodofskys should be credited whenever their rhyming version is used. All of those contributions came after the date Edna gave to her manuscript.
William N. Britton’s 1994 book, The Legend of Rainbow Bridge, presented the story as something related to him by a Native American shaman. Britton did not name the person or identify an Indigenous nation, so the claim cannot be traced beyond his book.
There is no documented tradition or earlier Indigenous version attached to it, and Britton’s book appeared after the Rainbow Bridge was already moving through rescue newsletters and online. Someone may have told him the story exactly as he reported it. The evidence ends with his account, which is not enough to present the Rainbow Bridge as an ancient Indigenous tradition.
Older parallels do exist. Norse mythology has Bifröst, a rainbow bridge between human and divine realms. Genesis uses the rainbow as a covenantal sign, while Isaiah imagines animals living together in a peaceable world. Long before Edna, cultures around the world pictured bridges, rivers and paths between life and whatever follows it. Canadian author Margaret Marshall Saunders even imagined a restorative animal afterlife in Beautiful Joe’s Paradise, published in 1902.
Those similarities place Edna’s words inside an ancient human longing for reunion across death. There is no evidence she read Saunders’s sequel or deliberately assembled her story from Norse and Biblical pieces. When Koudounaris asked about her influences, she said the words had come through the feeling of losing Major. People separated by centuries and cultures can reach for similar images when they are trying to imagine the same impossible reunion.
“How on Earth did you find me?”
Koudounaris had spent years researching animal mourning and pet cemeteries when the missing authorship began to bother him. The Rainbow Bridge was too culturally important, too deeply woven into the way people mourned animals, to remain attached to nobody. He worked through the possible claimants, eliminating them one by one, until a stray online reference to an “Edna Clyde” in Scotland caught his attention. The name was wrong and the accompanying story had been distorted, but it led him to Edna Clyne-Rekhy.
When he reached her in January 2023 and asked whether she had written the Rainbow Bridge, Edna’s answer was, “How on Earth did you find me?” She was eighty-two years old and had no idea that the page she wrote for Major had become one of the most widely shared pieces of animal-mourning literature in the world. The original was still in her possession, stored with the private history that the circulating copies had lost.
Then there is the page itself. Photographs published with Koudounaris’s investigation and the subsequent National Geographic report show the sheet filled in Edna’s handwriting, with corrections throughout, “Rainbow Bridge” written at the top and her sister’s words crossed out on the back. Family photographs show Edna with Major.
I cannot forensically date ink from a photograph, but I am still a human being capable of believing my own eyes. The worn notebook paper, the corrections and the crossed-out writing look exactly like what Edna says they are: something written quickly by a nineteen-year-old who was grieving her dog, then kept for the rest of her life.
The public reporting doesn’t include forensic dating of the paper and ink, and the route from Edna’s first typed copies to American rescue organizations remains unknown. Those qualifications matter because a good story doesn’t need us to pretend the evidence is stronger than it is. Even with them, no rival claimant has produced anything remotely comparable from an earlier date. Edna had the working manuscript, the dog who inspired it, the private history behind it and a completely credible explanation for why it travelled without her name.
For more than sixty years, Edna had no idea what her grief had done. Veterinarians handed the words to families, rescue groups printed them in newsletters, and strangers used them to get through the deaths of animals they loved. Meanwhile, she believed the Rainbow Bridge remained what she had intended it to be: something private between herself and Major. When National Geographic spoke with her, she was still trying to absorb the scale of it. “I’m absolutely stunned,” she said. “I’m still in a state of shock.”
Why the Rainbow Bridge stayed
People carried the Rainbow Bridge forward because they needed what Edna had imagined. Pet grief remains one of the deepest losses we are still routinely expected to minimize. A dog can shape the rhythm of every day for fifteen years. Your morning starts with him, your walks belong to him and every trip away from home is planned around getting back. Then he is gone, but the routines of the house keep pointing toward where he ought to be.
There is rarely a recognized ritual to carry that loss, and most people are expected to return to ordinary life without missing a step. Sometimes there isn’t even social permission to admit that the death of an animal has broken something in you. The Rainbow Bridge gives grief a shared language without asking anyone else to measure whether the relationship deserved it.
It also repairs the memory of the ending. Many of us last saw our animals old, frightened, struggling to breathe or exhausted by disease. Some of us made the decision that ended their pain and then carried the terrible authority of that decision home. Edna’s meadow returns health and movement to the body remembered from that final day, while allowing the relationship with the person left behind to continue.
Researchers have a name for the relationship that remains after somebody dies: a continuing bond. Research into companion-animal bereavement suggests that keeping some form of connection can help people make sense of the loss. I did not need a research term to know that we keep talking about our animals, remember their habits and sometimes catch ourselves expecting to see them in their old places. The term simply describes something grieving people have always done.
The Rainbow Bridge leaves enough unanswered that people can understand it according to whatever they believe. It may be heaven, some other kind of afterlife or simply a way to picture memory and love. Edna did not write a theology exam. She wrote somewhere she could imagine Major being well again.
Major was a Labrador, and the first documented North American circulation we can trace ran through Great Dane and Akita rescue groups. But Edna’s language was never limited to dogs. She wrote about animals, pets and special friends, leaving room for cats, horses, rabbits, birds and every other creature whose absence changes the shape of a home—including Monty and Sassy, and all the others we still miss.
I cannot tell you whether the Rainbow Bridge exists. That question belongs to faith, hope or whatever each of us does with love after death. The words themselves can be traced to Scotland in 1959, when Edna Clyne-Rekhy wrote them the day after Major died in her arms.
She imagined Major healthy and waiting for her, then typed a few copies for friends. Those copies travelled farther than she ever knew, changing as people used them to console one another. I understand why they kept going. After Sassy and Tanner, I understand the need to picture the animals we loved as they were before age or illness took so much away, still themselves and still connected to us. Edna found that picture while grieving one good dog in a house near Inverness, and other people recognized their own animals in it.
Sources
- Paul Koudounaris, “The Rainbow Bridge: The True Story Behind History’s Most Influential Piece of Animal Mourning Literature”, Order of the Good Death, February 9, 2023.
- Rachel Nuwer, “The ‘Rainbow Bridge’ has comforted millions of pet parents. Who wrote it?”, National Geographic, February 22, 2023.
- “Rainbow Bridge (Was: Pets passing away)”, archived
rec.pets.dogsthread containing the January 7, 1993 version and rescue-newsletter attribution. - Margaret Marshall Saunders, Beautiful Joe’s Paradise; or, The Island of Brotherly Love, 1902.
- Bethany Hughes et al., “The Impact of Continuing Bonds Between Pet Owners and Their Pets Following the Death of a Pet”.
Historical note: Edna Clyne-Rekhy’s authorship is strongly supported by her surviving manuscript, first-hand account and the absence of any competing earlier document. The precise route by which her unsigned typed copies entered North American rescue networks has not yet been established.
Historical-image notice: The three historical images are shown at reduced web resolution in direct connection with this article’s criticism, review and historical reporting. They were published by The Order of the Good Death with the credit “Courtesy of Edna Clyne-Rekhy.” Fluffy Shepherds claims no ownership of them, and all rights remain with their respective rights holder or holders. Attribution does not imply endorsement. A documented rights holder with a concern about this use may contact Fluffy Shepherds for prompt review.