Something about the prospect of turning 50 in March this year had been niggling me for some time, despite the fact that I’ve never taken much notice of birthdays. I was content to celebrate or not, was feeling somewhat blessed by the love and friendship and professional stimulation in my life, yet beneath it all something was troubling me. I began to realise it was sadness at the fact that soon after my 50th birthday I would become older than my big brother; my beloved, late, big brother. And that felt like an abomination.

Pip died in January 2011 and just as I spent much of 2010 fantasising that I could save his life or take his place, I have spent a fair part of the last few months imagining being given an hour with him as a 50th birthday present.

Until now, I haven’t had a clear sense of what I would say to him, apart from the most important and fundamental thing of telling him about his children, how they have grown up into good-hearted, funny, interesting young adults, true to those things he asked them to be, and telling him all the details of their loveliness that it is not my business to write about publicly.

I would tell him how dearly I miss him, but would I admit how dark it got without him? How I searched for him everywhere and found him only out on the water, on the waves. That it was windsurfing that kept me together in the year after he died; that it was only out at sea that I felt able to call his name (which I missed using so much). That I would go out beyond the pack and rest on my board there, arms folded across it, body weightless in the water, staring at the horizon, watching the swell of the sea beneath slate skies, staying out late into the darkness, feeling connected to him only there.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pip, left, and Tom at Lord’s cricket ground in London.

My brother took me under his wing when I was 15 and he was 22. He took me to the pub, answered my questions about girls (which were still current when he died, and have been piling up without him), stood on the North Bank at Highbury with me when I wasn’t allowed to go on my own, rid my life of a bullying element close to home, enjoyed a second studenthood for himself when I went to the same university he had, and brought me into the bosom of his family when he married and had children.

Throughout our 20s, 30s and 40s, our time together was marked by stupidity and happiness. We “got” each other and liked the same blend of silly and serious. We began every conversation with a David Jacobs “Hello there”, talked to each other about everything, and never once let each other down. And perhaps it’s that fact that makes it hard to know what I would want to say to him if I could have that hour.

Once upon a time, on a bad day, I would have told him how furious I was with him for rendering this life never quite as good as it would be with him here. I might have waved in front of him the postcard he sent me from a dream holiday (when he was fit and well) in his beloved Australia with his family, the card that said: “Before we die, you and I are going to sit here [he was in a pub overlooking Sydney harbour] and drink a pint of Coopers pale ale together …”

There is still a part of me that thinks we’ll have that drink one day, that finds it easier to believe that than the ridiculous notion that I will never, ever get to see my brother again. Pip, you owe me that pint in Sydney.

We knew each other so well that, if we had an hour, perhaps we would just reminisce – about Saturday morning bacon butties in his flat in Camberwell, south London, which we’d eat in his double bed a la Morecambe and Wise, or writing off our mum’s Citroën on the farm track to the Shipwright’s Arms at Oare Creek in Kent. Would we go for a drive and replay the “over-excited” game where, at traffic lights, we would overreact in apocalyptic proportion to a red light, screaming “Oh noooo, red liiiiiiight, I can’t take it any more, goddddddd NO!” and then erupt with joy when the lights went green? (You’ll presume this was a game dating from our childhood, but in fact we invented it in our 40s, when we were stuck at lights outside Mortons the Padlock, the ironmonger, on the A23.)

My brother was born in 1960. He was always well and had no health problems. Then at the age of 49 a suspected kidney stone was diagnosed as a rare and inoperable cancer and he died 10 months later. He was a thoughtful man on matters weighty and trivial but laughed at himself, at me and at most situations. He had a myriad of answers when I asked him each day how he was feeling: Still quite cancer-y … Never better. And he and his wife took great pleasure reminding me that it was him on chemo and me losing the hair (his never budged). But we could always turn to each other with serious concerns and I took his counsel on every important episode in my life (there weren’t that many).

He talked to me late on in his illness of his strong sense of guilt at leaving his children, his wife, me. Given an hour, would I tell him about the inescapable feeling that I had failed him when it mattered by not being able to swap places and take on his illness so that he could remain with his family? Or would I ask, Pip, just how the hell are we meant to work that apple press of yours, which you showed me how to use when you were dying and I wasn’t concentrating?

He asked me if I thought the children would be OK, and I replied, honestly, that I thought they would be

What would you say if you had an hour, and no more, with someone you love and have lost? And, why don’t I have an answer? The reason is, I have already had my hour with my dead brother. I had it when he was still my brave, beautiful, dignified, dying brother.

Not long after his diagnosis, when I was staying in his spare room while looking for a flat to rent nearby, he came into the room late one night. He asked me how I was doing and I said I was OK. I asked him how he was doing and he said that he was doing well except for the dying bit. Then I buried my head in his neck and sobbed. We held each other for a long time. I told him that I loved him, with all my heart, and always had. He thanked me. He told me he loved me too. We sat with our arms around each other.

He asked me if I thought the children would be OK, and I replied, honestly, that I thought they would be. He talked about them, and he talked about why he wasn’t scared. He asked me to talk about how I felt, and I told him I desperately didn’t want him to go and couldn’t see beyond that, but that I’d be OK because what else is there? We spent a long time hugging each other and I felt his hand moving slowly on my neck, stroking it, and we told each other again that we loved each other and he said I couldn’t bear to watch you die. I told him he owed me nothing else, no words, no time, that what he had said to me that night would last me for ever, and to concentrate now on looking after his own family and our mother. At the door, just before he left the room, he said: “We got it right, we’ve been good brothers.”

And because there is nothing to add to what we shared and talked about that night, I think if I could have an hour with my brother that, after telling him about his family, I would just want to hold him, look at him, take a walk with him. I honestly have nothing more to say, even though if he were still here with me, we’d talk for the rest of our lives. I’d settle for telling him one more time that I love him (Rachel Green in Friends was right, people love to hear that), and he would take the mickey out of me for being older than him.

• Men Like Air by Tom Connolly is published by Myriad, £9.99. To order a copy for £6.99, saving 30%, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call the Guardian Bookshop on 0330 333 6846.