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What is the Rainbow Bridge?

Updated November 6, 2026

When someone says their dog or cat "crossed the Rainbow Bridge," they mean the animal has died. The phrase comes from a short prose poem that pet owners have been passing to each other since at least the early 1990s. It's so familiar now that vets, shelters and sympathy cards use it without explaining it.

What the poem describes

In the poem, a pet who dies goes to a green meadow just this side of heaven. They're young and healthy again, there's plenty of food, water and sun, and they play with the other animals. The one thing missing is their person. When that person dies too, the pet spots them across the field, runs to them, and the two of them cross the bridge together.

It answers the two questions most of us have in the first days: are they all right, and will I see them again? The poem says yes to both. It mentions heaven, but it doesn't come from any church or scripture, so people of many faiths, and people with none, use it.

We don't reprint the poem here. The text is easy to find online, though the copies vary a little and many still carry no name or the wrong one.

Who wrote it

For a long time nobody could say. The earliest copy found online is a 1993 post to a dog lovers' newsgroup, which quoted a dog rescue newsletter from a year or so before. In 1994 a reader sent the poem to the Dear Abby advice column, which printed it with the author listed as unknown. As it spread, different people were credited with it, and several filed copyright claims on the title.

In February 2023, National Geographic reported that the poem was written in 1959 by Edna Clyne-Rekhy, then a 19-year-old in Scotland, after her Labrador, Major, died. The researcher Paul Koudounaris had worked through about 25 possible authors, and she still had her handwritten draft. She had typed copies for friends without putting her name on them, which explains how it went out into the world unsigned.

That's the most convincing account so far. You'll still see other names on prints, plaques and websites, so if you want to credit the poem on a card or a stone, it's worth knowing that the attribution has been argued over.

Older ideas behind it

The picture in the poem is much older than the poem. In Norse mythology, a burning rainbow bridge called Bifröst joins the world of people to the home of the gods. And Margaret Marshall Saunders, the Canadian author of Beautiful Joe, wrote a sequel called Beautiful Joe's Paradise about a green country where animals wait for the people who loved them. In her version they get there by balloon.

How people use the phrase today

• As a gentle way to say a pet died: "Biscuit crossed the Rainbow Bridge on Sunday."
• In sympathy cards and in the condolence notes some vet clinics send after a pet is put to sleep.
• As a name. Some pet cemeteries, memorial gardens and online memorials take their name from it.

Not everyone likes it. Some people find it a real comfort. Others find it too sweet, or it doesn't match what they believe happens after death. If you're writing to someone who is grieving, use it only if you know they do. Our page on what to write in a pet sympathy card has plenty of messages that don't mention it.

A short verse of our own

We wrote this one for Porchlight. It flips the poem around: for years the pet waited at the door, and now it's the person's turn.

If you'd like to put it, or any message, on a card you can send, our free sympathy card maker turns it into an image you can download.