It’s astonishing how quickly things can go downhill. Last Friday I was on the up. The first chapters of my latest novel were on their way to a publisher for evaluation, my problems at work were all but sorted and even the sun was shining.

Then it all went wrong. On Saturday I had an accident at work and hurt my shoulder and on Sunday ... on Sunday my brother died.

His partner rang me at half past eight Sunday morning to tell me he’d had a massive heart attack and was in the ICU on a life support machine. His heart had been stopped for many minutes, he was alive but there was no brain activity. I dashed the 40 miles to Leeds, and the nurses explained that there was no hope of any recovery. A ventilator was breathing for him, he was full of drugs, aware of nothing. At 12:15 they switched off the life support and he was gone.

Now I’m tormented with grief and guilt. All I can think of his him and the terrible fact that at 54 he was 2 years younger than me.

We were not close. We spoke frequently on the phone but living 40 miles apart we never saw each other and the last time we met was at my father’s funeral 5 years ago.

With his untimely and unexpected death, memories flood back. I used to look after him, take him to the pictures on a Saturday afternoon, keep the bullies off him at school. In our 20s, after service with the RAF Regiment, he was suddenly tougher than his big brother, and in the traumatic aftermath of my divorce, he was a friend, a drinking partner. When he got beat up in a pub fight in the late 70s, the old man and me went looking for the perpetrators the following day. (We never found him.)

We lost touch for a long time when his marriage broke down. I’d moved across the Pennines and he was living on the East Coast. Then my mother died in 1998 and we found time for each other. After the old man passed away three years later, we kept in touch by phone.

We didn’t have a lot in common. We didn’t even look alike; he was 6’ I’m barely 5’5, he was thin as a rake, I’m short and fat. He liked Rock ‘n’ Roll, Country & Western, I listen to the classics, he followed rugby league, I prefer football, he read and watched sci-fi and horror, I favour humour and thrillers, he was bird watcher, I’m a technophile, he liked people, I find them irritating.

I have family around me, a wife, children from my first marriage, but there’s a gap where he sat: a gap that I didn’t notice until it was empty.

I’m the worst throes of grief right now and the biggest part of it is guilt. I had all the opportunities and he got the cast offs. I could have been a success in many fields instead of a failure in all of them, he was never destined for any success, just a simple life doing what he wanted. He knew how to live, I never learned how.

Words have always been my medium, and now they seem inadequate. I can’t even describe how I feel, never mind what his passing means to me. I’m angry at the injustice of his life taken in this way and I cannot accept the enormity of what has happened. I don’t believe in god, but I have to wonder if god is trying to teach me a harsh lesson the way he takes those I love from me.

I have one small crumb of comfort. Wherever he is, nothing can hurt him anymore. Whatever demons may have pursued him in life can get at him no longer.

Rest in peace brother.

Terry Robinson (1951-2006)