I am the oldest of eight.  I am going to tell you something my siblings won't face -- the drugging and drinking that has destroyed us as a family. Alcohol.  Drugs.  All my siblings, addicted now or in the past, except me and the disabled Daniel.  The reason for prison, death, and jail and/or -- for three of my brothers -- each a separate story but the same one too. My father, Roberto Renaud, passed away a few weeks ago.  He was 95 years old, and had spent the last three years in a nursing home here in San Antonio, Texas.  He was a brutal father, but he tried.  He tried.  A sharecropper who worked infinite hours in the Texas Panhandle.  A WWII veteran. His family, an old Tejano family, has a family plot, a camposanto, outside of Raymondville.  It's all the family has left after the U.S. Mexican War.  It's a windswept acre of land a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico that includes our family's graves beginning in the 20th century...

Susana didn't come to my mother, her mother's, funeral in 2000. Says she's not coming to my father's funeral, who is in hospice care in a nursing home. And hasn't visited our disabled brother in twelve years. I know she thinks she's too good for Texas.  Well, so is Wendy Davis. She is a licensed therapist, and a dharma leader in the Bay Area. D H A R M A.  She yelled this to me as I was recovering from brain surgery in February. Tell me, how did she enter the helping and healing professions?