A friend in remission spoke longingly about wanting to adopt a dog but feeling she shouldn’t. Throughout college and young adulthood she had planned on getting a dog. She carefully waited until her life was stable and financially secure enough, her yard fenced in enough, and then illness befell her. And becoming ill had caused her to think of herself as a risk, someone who could become sick again, and therefore not the best candidate for dog ownership. Despite having regained her good health she felt herself a ticking time bomb, unworthy of commitment.

“But anyone of us might become seriously ill,” I told her. “Anything can happen to anyone at any moment and still we have dogs and children and mortgages.”

“But I could never put it down on the application.”

She was referring to the pet adoption application required by many animal rescue organizations. It seemed ludicrous but in fact I remembered another friend adopting a dog from a breeder at a time when she was waiting for test results regarding the possibility of a cancer recurrence. She wanted the dog for her mental health, to bring vigor and life back into a home in which there hung the dark cloud of potential illness. She definitely did not tell the breeder her situation.

My friend has a big family, plenty of people with houses and yards who could come to her rescue should she one day not be able to care for the dog. I found myself cheering her on, urging her to go ahead and not let illness rob anything more from her than it already had. Besides, pets have been shown to foster good health. Holding a kitty in your arms is supposed to lower your blood pressure. Dogs provide so much in the way of unconditional love and companionship.

She’s still thinking it over.

The issue really is one of commitment. Facing mortality head-on can have the effect of making a person almost commitment phobic. How does one re-invest in a life that has proven itself to be so fragile? In a sense a person in remission must relearn the illusion of permanence the rest of the world engages in. In order to reclaim one’s right to live and to plan, she must assume there always will be a tomorrow. It’s either very Zen or very un-Zen, this assumption of a future.

When my mother was in her second year of remission from ovarian cancer she adopted a Cairn Terrier and named him Lucky because she felt lucky to be alive. Lucky became my mother’s symbol of second chances, her big bold commitment to tomorrow despite her diagnosis’s lien on the future. Every morning my mother rose to take Lucky on a one-mile walk around the neighborhood was a miracle, a morning we hadn’t thought she’d have, a nose snubbed at an iffy prognosis.

None of us is any more mortal than another. Living fully is everyone’s right, regardless of his or her health.

I told my friend about a breast-cancer survivor I know who, the day of her last radiation treatment, put a personal ad in a local magazine.

“Which would you rather, a Cockapoo or a date?”

And still she’s thinking it over.