How can I make writes to named pipe block if the reader closes, and vice versa?

Right now if I write to a name pipe and then close the reader, the writer gets a SIGPIPE and then exits. For example,

$ mkfifo pipe
$ cat pipe & # read from the pipe in the background
$ cat > pipe # write to the pipe
line1
line2
...

If I then stop the reader process, the writer process dies because of the SIGPIPE the reader process sent when stopping. I don't want this to happen. If the writer tries writing to the pipe *before* a reader appears, the writer blocks and waits for a reader. I want behavior like this. If the reader closes the pipe, the writer should block and wait for a new reader. Likewise, if I stop the writer process, the reader process closes because it sees an EOF (or rather, a 0 byte read). I would also like for it to block until a new writer appears, instead. Does cat have a flag for doing this? If not, this is is probably a pretty simple C program.