A couple of years ago, upon the death of a good friend of mine from cancer, I wrote a post in which I listed the friends I had started to lose and thought about the statistical odds, I called it The Actuary Cometh.

But this latest one doesn’t feel actuarial or statistical. This one is more than the shock of the others. This one hurts.

I’ll get the gruesome stuff out of the way first. Last November Tim sent a message to all of us that, after feeling increasingly crook for a couple of weeks, he got scanned in hospital where a tumour was found between his liver and pancreas. Surgery followed in mid-December with a “Whipple Procedure” (don’t google images) to remove what Tim immediately named “Donald”. Then a few months of chemo, which was expected to be merely a precaution. Cancer usually gets people by not producing symptoms until it’s too late, whereas this one revealed itself early on. Tim was optimistic and therefore so were we, especially when he turned up at our varsity reunion looking skinny but well – and certainly better than when I’d seen him in hospital a couple of months earlier.

But it was not to be. In June he told us that it had got into his bones, although even then the doctors said they could give him “years, but not decades”. Given he had three young kids that would hopefully be long enough. He didn’t do his last chemo in July because he didn’t feel up to it, and that was when the thing came down like a hammer. The last week of July started with bad headaches, he quickly moved to the hospital and on the following Monday he was gone.

To say that we were all in shock is an understatement. Tim was healthy, fit (more so than most 61 year olds) and looked about, …. well you can judge for yourself from the photo above. At the wake the word often used was “Peter Pan”. I try to tell myself that with cancer, speed is a blessing.

The funeral was extraordinary. Possibly 300 people were there, representing many networks of friends, of which most were barely aware of the others, all arising from Tim’s journey’s around the world in the last thirty years, he being both the spark and the sinew that connected them. It was nice to jump into each group and introduce ourselves to each other, usually followed by the statement, “Oh, so your “X” that he talked about”.

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Over on his notices page I see one varsity mate attesting to 43 years of friendship. But I and another friend, Bill, can mark 47 years with Tim.

That’s because we first met him at the start of 1976 in the class of 4FK at Te Awamutu College. And when I look back on that I reflect on something that I must have understood about him even at the time, at least in my heart if not in my mind, something that was obvious at his wake in the numbers and the reactions of people: his incredible gift for friendship. It was never based on anything false. He was not a “hail fellow well met” chap. He did not slap people on the back. He did not grease or charm like some trained salesman. He didn’t fake or bullshit. He was always exactly the same guy in any situation.

There he is in 1976, with an impish grin. And he was an imp, a few inches shorter than every other guy in the class bar one.

His Dad worked in the dairy factory and left at the end of the first term (3 terms then) for a factory in the Hauraki Plains, so that was that for a briefly kindled friendship.

Somehow I learned of where he had gone, in a rough geographical sense, and since newspapers in that time published the results of those who had passed the exams it was possible to track him down in early ’78 when he passed SC. His initials were a giveaway for anybody who watched TV in that time, which was everybody. As such I could also see his progress through UE and Bursary. As I recall they listed not only the subjects but even the marks? Still, who knew where he would end up at varsity, assuming he went.

So it was that in March of 1980 I wandered into a Chemistry lab to obtain the lab manuals I’d need, to see a lone figure who I seemed to recognise but who stood an imposing 6’2″. He turned – and I pointed: “You must be Tim Kuper”. He grinned that great smile and responded, “And you must be Tom Hunter”. We found out that not only were we at the same varsity but in the same Hall, and so a friendship was re-kindled after four years. From that point on it was drunken parties, trips and general fun.

Tim had an A-Bursary – stunning his older brothers as being a “swot” – and intended to do engineering. But despite the best efforts of fellow engineering mates like Tony, Tim had clearly had enough of university study, if not the varsity party life. Particular stupid memories include:

  • Tim with a pitch perfect dress up of Devo’s (can’t get no) Satisfaction.
  • A 2am demand for munchies resulting in Tim raiding the bread bins at the back of the Knighton Road dairy, staggering back into my room with armfuls of loaves, followed by our panicked tracking of every slice he’d dropped between the two places in a literal follow-the-breadcrumbs crime scene.
  • Tim racing his dirt bike up three flights of stairs, along the 3rd floor corridor, and down the other end late one night (not drunk either).
  • The acquisition of his nickname, “Kuzer”, following a ribald comment at the breakfast table from a “Humanities” friend, typically drunk on language, about a girl that was keen on him (most were), “All she wants for Christmas is Timmy’s kuzer”. That last bit of Joyceian word creation stuck.

In 1983 he buggered off to London with his good mate, JD, for what turned out to be only the first of his OE’s. A year-long adventure across Australia and Europe that involved a London flat almost identical in its filth to that of the famous British TV comedy series of the day, The Young Ones. Fun times on the Aeroflot flight through Moscow that saw them deprived of their passports for several hours (returned without comment), and a short truck ride on Australia’s Hume Highway with one Ivan Milat. Tim was riding in the front beside Milat and between the guy smoking joints, generally seeming weird and strongly suggesting several times that they take a shortcut, Tim finally demanded that he and JD be let out. Watching the truck depart while they stood in the middle of nowhere, with a questioning look from JD, Tim simply said “That prick looked like the Yorkshire Ripper”. As JD said at the tribute, he was never more glad for Tim’s exhaustive reading of newspapers.

They both returned after just a year, realising that to truly have fun they’d need to not be on the bones of their arse. JD completed his degree but Tim did not. I’ll take credit for being the one who steered him towards being a computer operator, assuring him that a Comp Sci degree was not necessary and that it would get him well-paid jobs anywhere in the world, which is how it turned out.

The rest of the 1980’s consisted of ski trips, work and parties.

Two trips to Aussie in 1988, one for the World Expo and one for the All Black tour later that year. The first trip involving the horror memory of Tim and me on the Sydney-Brisbane overnight train, where getting blotto was the only way to deal with the non-reclining seats and overflowing toilets, plus lights on at 5am as it stopped for every small town in Queensland, plus our almost getting to 200km/h on the M1/A1 in a shit box rental for the return trip.

195km/h, April 1988

A few years ago, having found old photos of these trips, I scanned them and sent them to Tim, only to find out that his wife, clearly unaware of how popular tight shirts and Stubbies were at the time, proclaimed that it looked “Full on Brokeback Mountain”.

And of course walking the Milford Sound, complete with one cask of red wine and one case of Castlemaine 4X each.

Soon after this we both departed overseas, me to marriage and life in the USA, Tim to London, where he would this time stay for almost fifteen years. If anything he lived life even more relentlessly there than in NZ: running with the bulls in Pamplona; attending what may have been the greatest ever New Years Party at the Berlin Wall in December 1989; countless Euro trips from London, aside from annual ski trips to the Alps. He’s the only person I know who went to fifteen Oktoberfests – and enjoyed each one with different groups of friends. Plus trips to South America, SE Asia, Egypt and the Middle East and to South Africa for the 1995 World Rugby Cup (“Even though the AB’s losing was tough we got swept up in the total joy of the locals”). Tim would almost never say no to a trip with friends. And in between were probably hundreds of parties at his house flat in London, which became known as the SANZA flat. All of this involved an ever-expanding group of people who loved him.

In the 1990’s he got across to Chicago a couple of times and must have been impressed when I took him to Wrigley Field for a Cubs game, since he cheered them on with me in 2016 when they won the World Series for the first time in 108 years.

It was thus somewhat of a surprise when he returned to NZ in the early 2000’s, determined upon marriage and kids. Tim? The eternally youthful bachelor? Even after an incident when he was visiting my family: sleeping on the couch in the TV room, he was awoken by the 6am blast of morning cartoons and then watched my youngest peel off his diaper, throw it at the head of an older sibling and run, with the older one in hot pursuit and me trying to prevent bloodshed while making breakfast – and Tim pissing himself laughing. He reminded me of this incident in a text several years ago as we made plans to meet up:

Anyway, how’s Tuesday for lunch? Happy to go anywhere in town. We’re thinking lunch will be a quality time, whereas dinner will be mixed with hours of cajoling the kids to eat, stop fighting, do homework, make lunches, stop fighting, get off the F%$&ING screens!, have a bath, clean up, shut up, stop fighting etc etc etc while u piss yourself laughing 😂

I had very much looked forward to future years of sharing both war stories of the past and these stories of our kids. That is now not going to happen. It’s left a bigger hole than I expected, and I know I’m not alone in feeling this. On several occasions in the past couple of weeks I’ve thought of something I want to share with Tim, only to realise that now I never will.

Still, we’ll celebrate you, Tim, as long as we live – and we’ll keep an eye on your family too.

The farewell song at the wake as Tim’s coffin was carried out

As I said on the other post: we move forward with our memories and I am more aware than ever that the clock is ticking.