Any animal lover who has lost a beloved pet is familiar with the Rainbow Bridge, a symbolic reference to the place where pets cross into eternity. When a pet dies, it is said to cross the Rainbow Bridge into a beautiful, peaceful place where it is healthy and happy again, awaiting the day it can be reunited with its owner in a comforting poem that is often shared with people grieving the loss of a pet.
But as Southern Living reports, for some grieving pet parents, the Rainbow Bridge was a real place. Tucked away in the mountains of western North Carolina at Lake Lure Flowering Bridge near Chimney Rock, stood a rainbow-painted bridge created by artist Amy Wald in 2022. From its rails, the collars and tags of beloved pets dangled. Following the devastating flooding in the wake of Hurricane Helene, the bridge has likely been washed away.
“The bridge itself was full of so much love,” Emily Lauren, a photographer in Virginia, said in an interview with Southern Living. “You could tell a lot of thought and love went into the entire place. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I immediately started tearing up. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of collars. Some had their name tags still on them. Some had fur still on them.”
Lauren visited the bridge this summer to leave the collar of her dog, Moa, a Great Pyrenees who passed away earlier this year at the age of 5. “I went on a trip to Ireland in March of this year, and he was hospitalized two days before I got back home due to an ear infection,” Lauren says. “While at the vet, he started having cluster seizures. When I got to him, the vet told me he was brain damaged and paralyzed in his back legs from all of the seizures he had in those two days. I had to make the hardest choice to put him to sleep.”
Full of grief, Lauren chose to leave Moa’s collar on the bridge near the green color of the rainbow. “Ireland was beautiful and so incredibly green, and it was the only color I felt was the right choice to leave him with,” she says, adding that until recently, she could not even talk about the emotional trip.
As the record-breaking storm ripped across the Southeast, Lauren says her “heart broke all over again” learning the bridge had been washed away. “I was trying to keep up with the news on the hurricane, and then a video came on Friday night of Lake Lure, and in it they talked about how the bridge had been washed away,” she said to Southern Living. “My heart broke all over again, I cried myself to sleep. The devastation our tri-state area has suffered is indescribable.”
While processing the realization the bridge was gone, Lauren created a now-viral video and shared it to social media that showcases her trip to attach Moa’s collar this summer. “Saw someone say they all got to take one last swim together…and I lost it,” Lauren wrote on the video, which has racked up more than 29,000 likes on Instagram and nearly 100,000 views on TikTok.
Thousands of commenters from around the country weighed in on the clips, too. “Just think, someone, someday, whether it’s next week or 100 years from now. Will find your dog’s collar and say their name one more time,” one wrote. Another added, “Someone said, ‘They went out to gather the ones that didn’t survive the storms and take them over the Rainbow Bridge’.”
As states begin the process of recovery, Lauren says she hopes the Rainbow Bridge can be rebuilt. “I know that the bridge accepted donations before this hurricane happened, and I am sure they need them now more than ever if they decide to rebuild,” she says. “I hope people will donate and a new Rainbow Bridge can begin again because it gave so many of us a peaceful place to remember and honor our animals.”
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Photo Credit: woocat / Shutterstock.com