Till death do us part CASKETEERS' FOREVER LOVE

HOW KAIORA AND FRANCIS TIPENE KEEP THEIR HOME FIRE BURNING

- Fleur Guthrie

With a table overlooking Queenstown’s spectacular Lake Wakatipu and the log fire roaring, it couldn’t have been a more romantic dinner setting. Well, it would have been, only Francis Tipene – one half of TV’s popular show The Casketeers – was sitting alone with a film crew nearby, while other diners who recognised him came over to ask, “Where’s your wife?”

“She’s left me and gone back to Auckland,” he replied, before revealing that his beloved Kaiora had to unexpectedly head home after her aunty passed away while the family were on a week-long holiday.

“After the most challenging year dealing with the COVID restrictions on funerals, I’d booked a romantic date at Botswana Butchery just for her and I,” says Francis. “Lockdown pushed everything back, so the TV crew ended up coming on holiday with us to film and told me to go to dinner by myself. I was like, ‘No, I’ll look stupid’, but they paid for dinner, so I went and the food was amazing. I knew she would have loved it.”

With five children and three branches of their booming funeral business to oversee, date nights are a rarity for this Auckland couple, so they try to snatch alone time whenever they can – even if it’s just parking up the hearse to eat McDonald’s in a cemetery!

”I really appreciated that time, actually, because we were coming back from a tangi and I was so hungry,” says Kaiora. “Francis doesn’t like taking the hearse through the drive-thru, so he made me go in and order, but he said he’d find us a lovely picnic spot to stop and eat it.

“As we were driving around, I realised we were at Waikumete Cemetery and thought, ‘Are you for real?’