The Wide Span of the Rainbow Bridge
Reading Time: 6 minutesMy Dog Was Fine on a Friday—and Dead by Tuesday. A Specific Concept Has Helped My Grief, I’m a lapsed Catholic, but when my dog died, I clung to the concept of a pet afterlife. Why does it have so much staying power?, Pet death: The Rainbow Bridge poem pro
On a horrible day this past August, my cattle dog, Annie Oakley Tater Tot, died of liver failure. She was only 9, seemed perfectly fine on a Friday night, and was dead by Tuesday afternoon. When I returned home after putting her down, I screamed three times, laid on the ground, and shoved my face into her bed.
When I caught my breath again, I got up to call my father and tell him it was over.
‘Perfect timing. Sam just called,’ he said, referring to his yellow Lab who had died four months before. ‘He wanted me to let you know that Annie got over the Rainbow Bridge just fine. He said she’s looking healthy and spry, and he’s about to show her around.’
If you’ve had pets or spent any time around people with pets, you’ve probably heard of the Rainbow Bridge: an imaginary meadow where our pets go after they die, released from all sickness, injury, and pain. There, they can run around with other dogs until it’s time for us to join them, before we go together to the adjoining bridge of the same name. As the poem goes: ‘Your hands again cuddle his head and you look again into his trusting eyes, so long gone from life, but never absent from your heart, and then you cross the Rainbow Bridge together.’
I’m a 43-year-old lapsed Catholic who has doubts about any kind of afterlife, let alone a magical pet bridge. And yet, in that awful day when I put down my best friend, and in the weeks that followed, I almost believed my father, and pulled the image of Annie and Sam frolicking in a field across me like a shawl protecting me from the bitter cold of grief.
It’s not an unusual reaction to the loss of a pet, experts from the pet world have told me. The concept of the Rainbow Bridge, of this pleasant waiting room for our pets, can be tacked onto just about every belief system, including one as undefined now as my own. Even before the phone call with my father, I clutched a pamphlet the animal hospital gave me with the Rainbow Bridge poem.
It is, objectively, kind of cheesy. And yet, the Rainbow Bridge is deeply comforting to many, many people.
‘I really can’t believe it,’ Edna Clyne-Rekhy, 83, the author of the poem, told me from her home in Inverness, Scotland. ‘I’m just this widow who enjoys writing and friends coming over and teaching people to recycle. I never thought for a minute that this would happen.’
For most of its existence, the poem’s creator was unknown (it’s often attributed to Anonymous). The mystery was solved in February after author and photographer Paul Koudounaris tracked down Clyne-Rekh’s name on a website promoting one of her recycling talks. The article includes a photo of her original Rainbow Bridge poem handwritten on a sheet of notebook paper with her sister’s cross-outs.
Clyne-Rekh wrote the poem in 1959 when she was 19 years old, out of her grief over the death of her first dog, a Labrador retriever named Major. When she got married, she showed the poem to her husband, who suggested she publish it. She thought it was too personal, so instead she typed out copies to give to some friends.
She didn’t know that those copies would go on to be passed around for decades—the equivalent of going viral in the pre-internet age. Then, in 1994, the poem appeared in a Dear Abby column with the note: ‘If anyone in my reading audience can verify authorship, please let me know.’
Clyne-Rekhy never saw the column; she didn’t even know who Dear Abby was until Koudounaris told her. When she learned the news, she was shocked—and then was shocked again when Koudounaris shared emails he’d received from readers of his article who wanted to thank her for her poem and for helping them with their grief.
‘I had no idea it was all over the world like this,’ she told me as her current dog, Missy, a bichon frisé, sat by her side. ‘I’m just glad that it’s helped somebody.’
It’s done more than help someone. The idea of the Rainbow Bridge has become a standard way of talking about and visualizing what happens to our pets, said Nancy Saxton-Lopez, a licensed clinical social worker, veterinary social worker, co-author of The Pet Loss Companion: Healing Advice from Family Therapists Who Lead Pet Loss Groups, and co-host of the podcast by the same name. In the pet grief groups she runs, she’s found it offers people something for their minds to hold on to in a time of abject grief.
‘The Rainbow Bridge poem signifies what people want to hear, that [their pets] cross the bridge and they become healthy, and they become young, and they get all the treats that they want, and they can run in the fields—exactly what the poem says,’ she said. ‘That gives all of us who are grieving some real comfort. We know that their spirit is in a really good place, and that they can be with other dogs and have fun and be well taken care of.’
The Rainbow Bridge has been so successful and widespread because it’s malleable, and adapted by people from a panoply of religions and belief systems to fill in a pet-sized grief gap, said Andrew Dean, a social scientist at the University of Sunderland.
He conducted a survey about attitudes on the Rainbow Bridge concept, which was published in the Journal for the Study of Religious Experience, and found that people are ‘sticking it into whatever else they believe.’ That’s even true for those who don’t believe in an after, he added. ‘That doesn’t seem to exclude atheists, and perhaps, to me, that’s one of the most intriguing things of all.’
Actor, writer, and producer Rachel Bloom considers herself a ‘practical atheist, theorical agnostic.’ She has a dog, Wiley, and became obsessed with the idea of the Rainbow Bridge when she was pregnant with her daughter. She was, in a way, pre-grieving Wiley, and was ‘feeling this overwhelming depression about my dog, and thinking about this idea of the Rainbow Bridge,’ she said. The poem struck her as being important, but a bit like Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, which is to say, also corny.
That led her to do a deep dive into the commercialization of the Rainbow Bridge and the often absurd quality of the art and products it’s inspired, like posters featuring pets depicted as angels, and a digital graveyard where you could purchase a spot for your pet, with the option of also buying a DVD of a Rainbow Bridge song. She includes ‘At the Base of the Rainbow Bridge,’ a song in Death, Let Me Do My Show, a one-woman comedy-musical that ran this summer in New York City and is now back for a Dec. 6 to Jan. 7 run. Like most of the show, the song pokes fun at death and grieving but is also serious about it. ‘I’ve been interested in this for a while, the idea where love makes you earnest in a way that’s very mockable.’
In the song, she sings about what the Rainbow Bridge would actually look like if all our pets were waiting around, including that it might be kind of gross with them all living together. And what if you had two dead pets? Would there be tension, especially if you got one after the other died?
Which seems ridiculous when you think about it (and put into song), but I did wonder if my first dog, Emily, who hated all other animals, especially other dogs, would be annoyed with Annie taking up her space, and if there would be a competition to see who could get to me first. But remember: I don’t know if I really believe in the thing.
Pet grief runs so deep that it is helpful to have something comforting to cling to, and the Rainbow Bridge can be an invitation to talk and think about our departed pets in a positive light, rather than as an empty hole in our lives. Clyne-Rekhy has had dogs her whole life, but still cried about Major on the phone while we talked about the dogs we’ve loved, and lost. We swapped photos of our dogs by email after, and she encouraged me to let another dog into my life.
I will. I wrote most of this story with a little mutt of a foster dog by my feet, and never once felt that I’d keep him. I’m not ready yet to take another plunge. Until then, when I’m yanked back down into the depths of depression and grief about losing my sweet Annie too soon, and the images of her final moments roar back, I think of her as she was in the full bloom of her life, no more jaundiced eyes and collapsing back legs, no more cries of pain, and instead waiting for me, her red speckled coat glowing, little stub tail waving, to accompany me across a glittering rainbow that I don’t really believe is real, but has brought me comfort in the darkest times of my grief anyway. That’s all thanks to a poem written by a 19-year-old girl that has sailed around the world over and over again, giving so many people respite.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/pet-death-rainbow-bridge-poem-who-wrote-it.html
Ref: slate
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