Firefighter Billy Piper ran the 2019 Denver 9/11 Memorial Stair Climb in remembrance of the 343 first responders who died in the terrorist attack – and in honor of the new love of his life.

Traci Kern Piper is an accomplished Denver stage performer and vocal instructor. But in 2001, she was employed at One Liberty Plaza – a building so close to the World Trade Center, its facade crumbled in the explosion. In the years that followed, Kern couldn’t bring herself to leave the house on any Sept. 11. She just couldn’t.

But by September 2019, she was a few months into a promising relationship with Piper, a decorated Navy veteran and industrial firefighter with the Suncor Energy Fire Department in Commerce City. Piper told Kern he would be joining dozens of other firefighters in running up 110 flights of stairs wearing full tactical gear. And then, the couple were going out to celebrate.

Celebrate? 

“He told me, ‘Yes, we’re going to celebrate the lives that those people lived, and we’re going to celebrate that you lived through it,’” Kern said. Afterward, Piper gave Kern the challenge coin he earned by completing the grueling exercise. “He told me, ‘This is for you. Now … let’s go celebrate.’”

Two years and two weeks later, these later-life lovers were married – he at 53, she at 46. This past September, he completed the Denver 9/11 Memorial Stair Climb for the fourth time.

On. Jan. 11, Piper wasn’t feeling great. His right leg was swelling up a bit. Kern dropped him at the front door of a hospital E.R., and he walked in on his own. By the time Kern parked the car and entered the hospital, Piper had collapsed and was in full cardiac arrest.

In the inconceivable hours that followed, it became inescapably clear that Piper would not survive. Doctors told Kern that she had hours, not days, to make the only decision that would prevent his inevitable death from being a brutal passage. Not enough time to get her mother here from Nebraska to help her through it.

There was only one thing to be done. Kern turned on her iPad, placed it on Piper’s belly and fired up a broadcast of a youth hockey game that was about to start in Albert Lea, Minn.

Albert Lea is where Kern’s 12-year-old Nebraska nephew, KC Kern, was about to play in a big-time youth hockey tournament. So big that, yes, the games are broadcast online.

When KC heard that his uncle was dying back in Denver, he was so wrecked, he told his dad he didn’t think he could play. Kevin Kern, Traci’s brother, helped his son to see that maybe the best way to honor his beloved uncle would be not only to play, but to kick total butt.

KC kicked total butt. With Billy Piper’s name written on the back of his goalie helmet, KC proceeded to stop 36 shots in leading the Fremont Flyers to a big victory. The broadcasters, who dedicated the call to Billy Piper back in Denver, called it the best game of KC’s young hockey career.

Back in Denver, Traci Kern watched the game with tears of intermingled joy and pride and devastation running down her face. After the game, she let her husband go. Piper died on the morning of Jan. 12 at age 57, despite no prior history of heart disease. 

A ‘bolt of lighting

It was a match made by Thunderbolts. 

Piper grew up in Park Hill and graduated from Manual High School in 1984. Thirty-five years later, Piper asked Thunderbolts classmate Carla Kaiser Kotrc if she knew any single women. Kaiser set him up on a blind date with a reluctant Kern, who told Kotrc she was done with online dating.

“Carla responded, ‘Well, you don’t have to marry him. You just have to meet him for coffee,’” said Kern. “Isn’t that funny?”

Kern was hoping the man would be ugly. Boring. Self-centered. A terrible conversationalist. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘Please, be a jerk,’” she said. “I just wanted to go home and put on my pajamas and snuggle on the couch with my puppies and watch a movie.”

Instead, “I walk in and this really handsome guy meets me at the door in his Navy shirt and sexy jeans and this beautiful, beautiful smile,” Kern said. “And I was like, ‘Well, crap. Apparently, I do have to marry him.’”

She did, on Sept. 25, 2021, in Iowa. On a trip to Disney World, the couple bought a present for Kaiser Kotrc, their matchmaker. It was a pair of Mickey Mouse ears they had embroidered with the words “Wing Girl.” It was Billy’s idea. “Gift-giving,” Kern said, “was his love language.”

Tink (his endearing nickname for Kern) and Billiam (her nickname for Piper when he was being annoying) had fewer than five years together. And it was only sparingly that Piper learned the details of her husband’s remarkable upbringing in Park Hill.

Piper called himself a “Blaxican” – his mother, Josephine Piper, was a Chicana nurse’s aide at St. Anthony’s who grew up in Johnstown. His father, Dr. Ray Piper, was one of the first two Black graduates of Kansas City University (class of 1960). He went on to become the first osteopathic physician to be certified in general practice by the American College of General Practice. He was also among the founders of Denver’s Juneteenth celebration. In the 1990s, participants in the annual Miss Juneteenth pageant competed for the $500 Dr. Ray E. Piper scholarship award.

William Clayton Piper was born on May 18, 1966. He had two brothers and a sister, Alicia. Ray Jr. died in 1973 when Billy was just 7. Gerald died in 1995. His father and mother died in 1994 and 2018, respectively.

Young Billy was deeply affected by the death of his hero, older brother and Navy veteran Ray Jr. Four days after graduating from Manual High School in 1984, Billy enlisted in the Navy in tribute to him. Billy served through 1988, primarily as a gunner’s mate stationed on the USS Coontz in the Persian Gulf. “He just loved to serve,” Kern said. 

Back home, Piper took a series of odd jobs before earning an associate degree in process control at Red Rocks Community College. That’s the study of products from raw materials all the way up to customer distribution. That landed him a job at Suncor Energy, where he additionally joined the company’s all-volunteer fire department. “Billy found his true passion when he got on that fire and rescue team,” Kern said.

Suncor is a Canadian-owned refinery that produces 98,000 barrels of gasoline and diesel fuel every day. Piper was part of the crew that responded to the 2022 Christmas Eve fire that left two other Suncor firefighters badly burned. The refinery was shut down for three months.

“I was in Nebraska at my mom’s house when Billy called and told me, ‘You need to know I’m OK, but two of my guys are not, so just – pray for them,’” Piper said.

Here lies love

The man it took Kern 46 years to find is gone, and she is fighting the fundamental unfairness of it all.

What she has lost, she said, was her best friend, “a blue-collar guy who loved Shakespeare, old-school Broncos and rucking” – a series of military-style exercises that can last up to 24 hours (while wearing a weighted backpack). He loved Devo, Prince, zombie movies, “The Walking Dead,” bacon, and being dog dad to Hugo and Henri.

It turns out, Piper was also a lover of live theater that wasn’t unleashed in him until he met Kern, who is considered one of the top vocalists in Colorado. But he never actually got to see her perform until she was featured in the Cherry Creek Theatre Company’s stage musical “Sondheim on Sondheim” this past November. She more begrudgingly pulled him into the wonderful world of Disney, which she says he really did grow to appreciate.

He also loved hockey and the Colorado Avalanche. “When he told me he loved hockey,” Kern said, “I told him: ‘You’re in the right family now.’”

More important, said Kern, Piper was “the most genuine, generous human you will ever meet.” He kept a stash of cash (not coins) in his car to give to homeless people. “And if anyone ever said to him, ‘What if they go spend it on drugs or alcohol?’ Billy would just say, ‘Great. I gave them a great last kick.’” That’s because, she said, “he was always helping people.”

But to fully understand what Kern has lost requires a full understanding of her own personal journey to meet him. In 2018, Kern made a decision, for health reasons, to transform her own life and body. Channeling the discipline of a Navy veteran and the actual oversight of both a physician and nutritional therapist, she proceeded to healthily lose 180 pounds. After which, she met Piper.

Kern wants to be perfectly clear when saying she didn’t lose weight to make herself more attractive to a man. “Billy has seen pictures of me before, and he was like, ‘You look cute,’” she said. “But when I look at those pictures, I see someone who was sad and shy and afraid and so inside of myself. By losing that weight, I was unzipping the cocoon I was in and stepping out into myself.

“Before, I don’t know that I would’ve allowed Billy to love me.”

Visitation will take place at 9:30 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 25, followed at 10:30 a.m. by a celebration service at Olinger Highland Funeral Home, 10201 Grant St., in Thornton. Contributions are being accepted at gofundme.com.