I had to sneak the piles out of the house, because my brother wanted to keep every Norman Rockwell plate. With my parents gone, it was all he had. One of the ravages of his condition is that the gray matter that remains doesn’t process what it can’t see. My father left one spring afternoon with his golf clubs and died of a heart attack after sinking a putt on the 18th hole. Jimmy assumed he must be playing an extra round and would soon be home.

Five months later, my mother died. That was easier for Jimmy to comprehend, because he watched the cancer slowly claim her. As her days were dwindling, she issued instructions on how I was to look after him in the family house. I agreed halfheartedly, and just to be certain, she called a lawyer to ensure that Jimmy’s consent would be required to sell the house.

I expected that consent would come easily. After all, I loved him like a brother, only more so, and I had bossed him around since we were little. My parents ran the show inside, but I patrolled the perimeter. “You want me on your team, you have to take Jimmy, O.K.?” I didn’t treat him like a burden and neither did the other children. And I tattled on the bullies who grabbed his Mickey Mantle glove or disabled the training wheels on his bike.

So surely Jimmy would see the wisdom of moving out of our big place with the avocado-green appliances and into a smaller home designed for someone in need of constant supervision.

He didn’t see anything of the sort. After our tour of a supervised-living facility, he asked why I wanted him to live with a bunch of handicapped people. Jimmy couldn’t ride a two-wheeler, but there was something else he could do: insist on staying put. Had he somehow figured out that my mother, in a final effort to prove she knew best, had given me total responsibility but him absolute control?

I told the real estate agent we wouldn’t be selling after all and brought Jimmy to live with me in Washington. I took him everywhere. At CNN, dressed in his funeral suit, he already knew and loved my close friend Michael Kinsley, but was fascinated by Michael’s “Crossfire” co-host, Pat Buchanan, because he looked so much like my father.