03/09/2026
Long before millions of grieving pet owners knew the words Rainbow Bridge, they belonged to one heartbroken 19-year-old girl and the dog she could not imagine living without.
His name was Major.
In 1959, Edna Clyne was living near Inverness, Scotland, when her beloved Labrador Retriever died. Major was the first dog who had truly been hers, and their bond was unusually close. When his life ended, Edna was holding him in her arms.
The next day, she was still overwhelmed with grief.
Her mother saw how badly she was hurting and suggested that she try putting those feelings onto paper.
So Edna sat down and began to write.
What emerged was a vision of a peaceful place where beloved animals wait until the people who loved them arrive, allowing them to eventually continue their journey together. She called it Rainbow Bridge.
Edna never planned to make it famous.
She eventually typed a few copies for friends who had been moved by her words. Crucially, she did not put her name on them. The copies were passed from person to person, slowly separating the poem from the young woman who had written it.
Then, in 1994, Rainbow Bridge appeared in Dear Abby.
The column reached an estimated 100 million readers, but there was a problem. Nobody seemed to know who had written the words that were making so many grieving pet owners cry. Dear Abby even asked readers to help identify the author.
Decades passed.
Then art historian and author Paul Koudounaris began investigating.
His search eventually led him back to Scotland and Edna Clyne-Rekhy. When he contacted her in 2023, she was 82 and still had something extraordinary in her possession.
The original handwritten page from 1959.
For more than six decades, countless grieving people had found comfort in words written by someone whose name they never knew.
And those words had begun not with fame, publishing or an audience.
They began with a 19-year-old girl missing her Labrador.
Sometimes something written for one dog becomes a way for millions of people to remember their own.
