Come to bed with me?”

“Huh? No, I’d rather read this book about cancer...”

When 67-year-old textile artist Sima Elizabeth Shefrin’s husband, Bob Bossin was diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer in 2011, the couple would crack ‘cancer jokes’ to blunt the edge off a serious health condition. “I don’t know if I would call us fun-loving,” says Shefrin in an email interview from Gabriola Island, British Columbia. “But we do share a peculiar sense of humour. The book is about what really happened.”