A few years ago, my wife and I were driving around southwestern Utah looking for this slot canyon that we wanted to go hiking in.
At some point, we made what we thought was the last turn for the trailhead and instead found ourselves driving along this winding road that led to a parking lot. And when we got out of the car, we found ourselves face to face not with the trailhead but rather a set of iron gates and a sign that said “Angels Rest.”
We checked our phones and discovered that we had somehow accidentally ended up at one of the world's most famous pet cemeteries. So we decided to go in and take a look around.
As we walked through the gates, there was a little breeze in the air and the sound of wind chimes. They were beautiful. I took out my phone and started recording.
We wandered along stone pathways lined with engraved bricks and slabs of clay. There were hundreds of them with inscriptions addressed to dearly departed pets.
They said things like:
Jack, sweet dreams, my precious baby. Until we meet again, Mom.
In loving memory of sweet Dino, part goat. All heart.
Now, my wife and I don't have any pets, but we ended up staying at Angel's Rest for like an hour. There was just a power to the place. In the years since that afternoon, I have often thought about that feeling.
It's not like it was my first time in a cemetery, but something about Angel's Rest felt different and I could never put my finger on what it was until I met Paul Koudounaris.
“I will try my best to keep the cats from jumping on the computer,” Koudounaris said during an interview.
Koudounaris isn't just a pet owner. He literally wrote the book on pet cemeteries. It's called “Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves and Eternal Devotion.” Koudounaris spent over 10 years traveling the world and studying animal burial rituals.
He is fascinated by the grief we feel for our pets, in part because they occupy this kind of liminal space. We treat them as something more than animal, but less than human. It's a unique relationship, which may be why pet cemeteries have become unique spaces.
If you read the inscriptions on the graves at a place like Angel’s Rest, you don't find much of the matter of fact, emotionally detached writing you see in a human graveyard. Instead of “Here lies John, husband, father hero;” you get stuff like, “part goat, all heart.”
A pet cemetery is a place to feel the real feelings that death makes you feel, no matter how uncomfortable or awkward case in point.
A pet headstone in Ajo, Arizona, which features one of Koudounaris’ all time favorite inscriptions.
“It says: ‘Ringo, you were the best dog, everybody loved you except Uncle Ted Ted. F–k Uncle Ted,’” Koudounaris said.
That kind of honesty, Koudounaris said, is why places like Angel’s Rest feel so special. There's no self-consciousness. It's a place where it's OK to be vulnerable.
“And it's so open and it's so pure. I think it's just such a more pure form of expression and emotion,” Koudounaris said.
When you walk around a pet cemetery, you're practically guaranteed to see references to something called the Rainbow Bridge. I saw them all over the place at Angel's Rest. One inscription in particular said: “To all my pets, rest in peace. See you at the Rainbow Bridge, I love and miss you all.”
“The Rainbow Bridge is this meeting place. It's, it's kind of like a bridge to paradise, and when an animal dies, it will wait for us at the bridge,” Koudounaris said.
The idea comes from a poem, which many people discovered in the 1990s when it was published without attribution in a Dear Abby advice column. At the time, Dear Abby had a readership in the tens of millions. And since then, thanks to the internet, the Rainbow Bridge has spread all over the world.
But until last year, nobody knew who wrote the poem until Paul Koudounaris tracked down Edna Clyne-Rekhy.
“She is in her 80s. She lives in Scotland. She wrote it when she was a teenager, when a dog that she owned named Major died,” Koudounaris said.
Edna was distraught and tore a page out of her sister's notebook.
“And she said she could feel the dog writing through her hand telling her what to write,” Koudounaris said.
The unsigned poem eventually got passed around without Clyne-Rekhy’s knowledge until it found its way to Dear Abby.
Koudounaris thinks it caught on because most religions don't really have much to say about the fate of animal souls.
“We have always spiritually lacked, especially in the West, a way to get these animals into paradise,” Koudounaris said.
The Rainbow Bridge, like the pet cemetery, fills an emotional void. It's given countless people language to express their feelings of loss.
And Koudounaris said that for Clyne-Rekhy, that feeling is more than enough. She doesn't mourn the loss of whatever fame or fortune she might have earned from having her name associated with the Rainbow Bridge. On some level, she's still mourning the loss of Major.
“Every time someone quotes Edna, every time someone republishes those words, it's also a tribute to her dog that she loved,” Koudounaris said.
That feeling will have to be enough until Edna herself passes away and she and Major are reunited. At least if her poem is to be believed.
This is how it ends.
“The nose twitches, the ears are up, the eyes are staring and this one suddenly runs from the group. You have been seen.
And when you and your special friend meet, you take him or her in your arms and embrace. Your face is kissed again and again and again.
And you look once more into the eyes of your trusting pet.
Then you cross the Rainbow Bridge together.
Never again to be separated.”
