A 24-foot bridge painted in every shade from red to indigo now stands in St. Cloud's Heritage Park, giving central Minnesota pet owners a physical place to grieve animals they've lost. The Central Minnesota Rainbow Bridge Memorial Garden opened in July, built by more than 150 donors and volunteers who spent over a year finding it a home.
The project traces back to the 2024 death of a Boston terrier-pug mix named Mozzie, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune. Laura Ellavsky got Mozzie while she was a college student in Moorhead, and the dog later moved with her to the Twin Cities for an internship and then back to St. Cloud. In March 2024, Mozzie suffered a broken leg after a sudden movement and was found to have a mass on the leg that Ellavsky thought was likely cancer, leading her to decide it was time to euthanize him at age 8. That loss pushed her to start planning a central Minnesota pet memorial that same year.
Ellavsky, who founded and designed the memorial garden, runs Good Souls, LLC in St. Cloud, where she works as a certified End-of-Life Companion Animal Doula, offering non-medical emotional support and memorial planning for grieving pet owners. She also created a nonprofit to sustain the project. Today her household also includes a chihuahua named Tootsie and a lab mix named Bronco that she adopted from a shelter.
A Long Search for the Right Spot
Before landing at Heritage Park earlier this year, the project spent more than a year pursuing site options across five surrounding municipalities and two other St. Cloud parks, including Talahi Woods and Pioneer Park as well as locations in Sartell and Waite Park, according to KNSI. The site the memorial finally landed on sits near the Stearns History Museum.
The bridge itself carries handcrafted details meant to represent the range of animals people mourn. Metal post caps were custom-forged by a veteran-owned shop in Indiana to depict species including cats, spiders, horses and geckos, while the rails were hand-painted by local Minnesota artists, KNSI reported in July. Each post along the bridge holds a metal animal silhouette, and the first post represents Mozzie himself.
A second post honors Nelix, a chinchilla belonging to Megan Wagner, who serves as secretary of the memorial's nonprofit board. Nelix died in 2025 at age 17, and Wagner hung a photo of the chinchilla on a bridge beam in July, per the Star Tribune's account. Visitors are encouraged to hang pet collars, laminated pictures or letters along the bridge railings, and organizers hope to eventually add a pond-shaped rock garden where people can leave personalized painted stones, along with flower beds and benches.
Filling a Gap in How Minnesotans Mourn Pets
“Pet-loss grief can be isolating and extremely difficult,” Ellavsky said, according to the same report, adding that the memorial should give people time to stay and reflect. Wagner echoed that sentiment, calling the memorial a small project intended to make a big impact. Organizers sell pet tags as a fundraiser for ongoing maintenance and plan to affix the purchased tags to bridge posts.
The need for spaces like this is backed by research. A December 2025 study in Omega – Journal of Death and Dying found that pet loss frequently produces what researchers call disenfranchised grief, a form of mourning minimized by broader societal norms, according to findings indexed on PubMed. The study suggests that community-focused memorial spaces are crucial for emotional healing precisely because pet loss often isn't treated with the same weight as human bereavement.
Minnesota's existing options for handling pet remains are limited. Under state law, Minnesota Statute Sec. 35.82 allows pet owners to bury deceased domestic animals on private property, as long as the remains are buried deep enough to prevent scavenging by wildlife, though local zoning rules can add restrictions. The Twin Cities Pet Cemetery, which opened in the 1920s and was later donated to the Animal Humane Society, still allows ceremonies but has no burial space left. Other pet burial sites exist in Farmington and Owatonna, according to the Star Tribune.
Lawmakers Weigh Co-Burial With Pets
State legislators are also revisiting the rules around pet remains. Minnesota House File 3958, introduced in March 2026, would let public and private cemeteries permit green burials of un-embalmed pets or pet cremains alongside human remains, covering dogs, cats and chickens enclosed in biodegradable caskets or shrouds, per the Minnesota House of Representatives.
St. Cloud's memorial isn't the state's only Rainbow Bridge. A similar bridge opened at a dog park in Faribault in 2025, organized by local resident Jessica Keeley-Mercado and her family after being approved by local park officials in late 2024, according to a GoFundMe campaign for the Meadow Brook Rainbow Bridge. Another bridge is slated to open at a church in Wayzata.
The concept has spread nationally in recent years. What is thought to be the first Rainbow Bridge memorial in the country opened in North Carolina four years before the St. Cloud memorial, at the Lake Lure Flowering Bridge, drawing more than 16,000 visitors before Hurricane Helene heavily damaged and closed it in September 2024, according to the Post and Courier. Similar memorials have since gone up at Folly Beach in South Carolina, in Greenfield, Indiana, and at Furman University, part of a broader wave of physical pet memorial sites erected across the country since 2024.
For Ellavsky, the St. Cloud bridge is meant to become something more lasting than a single tribute. She has said she hopes it grows into a place of kinship for grieving pet owners across the region, a spot where losses like Mozzie's and Nelix's are remembered alongside those of strangers who understand exactly what that grief feels like.
