If there is something after death, and it is, no living being can say. Especially this is true for our animal friends: we don't know if we will find them again one day, but we strongly hope so.

Anyone who has been at his side for years a dog or a cat or another pet, and has then suffered the loss, knows well the lacerating pain that this entails if you really loved them and were loved in return. Their death leaves a void in our lives that it's not easy to succeed if you ever succeed.

Animals: the soul and the Rainbow Bridge

This is why we often wonder about the possibility that animals also have a soul (maybe even with a specific weight), that for them there may be an afterlife, that one day we will finally be able to get together without pain and care. The native Americans in particular hand down an ancient legend, that of the Rainbow Bridge.

According to this myth, when a cat or another animal dies, its soul follows a luminous path, the Rainbow Bridge precisely, finally arriving in a kind of animal paradise, where all our four-legged (and not only) friends will be able to gather and play again, happy and carefree, without any pain whatsoever.

We will meet again after death and it will be a party

From time to time one of them will stop, smell the air, scan the horizon and then suddenly start running. Finally, he will have recognized you, you too have passed away and now you can come together and come back to love you, human and animal, as in the course of your earthly life.

It is a very beautiful myth, very powerful, very fair. Death is an act that is at the same time terribly natural but terribly unjust, if you have witnessed the last moments of your loved one's life you know how frightening they can be, whether they are human or animal.

You know that sense of powerlessness, that blind rage that mounts inside you, that desire to destroy everything because now nothing has more value. And that exhaustion, that apathy, which captures you shortly afterward, when you understand that you are doomed to stay and you cannot see your dear animal again, which over the years has managed to become a "adoptive member" of your family.

A loss that leaves an unbridgeable gap

You will look for him/her for a long time with your eyes when you return home, even though you know he/she can no longer suddenly appear. You will continue to pay attention to where you store glasses, food or clothes, although no one will be able to drop them, or subtract, or play with them. You may avoid even cleaning that sweater so full of cat or dog hair, so as not to lose this last contact.

To think that our little companion has followed a path of light and now rest in peace, that one day we will be able to find him/her again, to hug him/her again, to play with him/her again gives us a little comfort. But the fear that all this does not exist, that it is only a kind illusion of ours, grips us and will grip us all our lives. We hope that the legend of the Rainbow Bridge or the religious beliefs about the afterlife have a fund of truth.

To Red, my little cat born January 28, 2002, who died July 28, 2019. May he play at the Rainbow Bridge until we meet again.