From the service: a meditation...

I am sorry I couldn’t be here with you today, but I am at a retreat in Assisi, Italy, meditating on the dreamlike circumstances that happened only last Monday, circumstances that, in consequence, have brought you here today.
Leslie’s life had consequence for all of us here, and I am sure others will do an exemplary job memorializing his life. I would like to memorialize his death by meditating on it, since for me, and I think for Fernando, and maybe for you, it may have lasting consequence.
As we all know, dreams can be understood as meaningful, and for thousands of years, shamans, including Freud, have turned to them to understand circumstance. In my experience, waking reality is also a form of dream, and I cannot help seeing events as meaningful, even when I do not fully comprehend their meaning.
The events of last Monday were one of the most powerful waking dreams I have witnessed, and I want to relate those events to you as part of a continuing meditation on death. Why me you may ask? Because it is I who found the lifeless body of Leslie!
So join me if you will in this guided mediation on death. Close your eyes if you will, let your mind be stilled, let your third eye open…
It was an ordinary Monday, yet a beautiful fall day in Houston, with the sun shining bright. As you may or may not know, I am part of a reading group that was formed a few years back. I have been part of two reading groups, and in these two Leslie was also a part. The first was called the Magnolia Circle, which after a long and wonderful life dissolved. The second, started a few years after the Magnolia Circle ended and dedicated to Continental philosophy, didn’t have a name.
As I arrived to continue our reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time, I saw Fernando in his pickup truck, waiting. I looked over to see if Leslie’s Honda was in the carport, the sign that Leslie was back from teaching philosophy at the University of Houston. It wasn’t. So I got out and Fernando got out, and we walked over to the wicker bench Leslie had placed right outside his front door. We sat down on the bench to wait for Leslie. The sun was shining directly onto us. It was so bright. We started talking about what everyone is talking about these days, the state of the economy, was it a depression, what would a 21st century depression look like, and suchlike. It was so bright, and Fernando got up, so that the sun wouldn’t shine directly into his eyes. So bright... He stood up and leaned against Leslie’s front door, and we continued chatting? Time passed and we were oblivious until Fernando restless asked, “Where’s Leslie?” Fernando straightened up from leaning on the door and walked out… out to the driveway. I followed him. I called Leslie on my cell phone, but there was no answer. This was getting a bit strange. Fernando was slowly moving to his truck. Leslie didn’t look like he was coming. I looked up at the second floor garage apartment, up as if trying to see into the apartment, to feel Leslie’s presence. I said, “maybe he’s here, I’ll go check.”
I walked to the front door and tried it. It opened. “Great,” I thought, “That’s a good sign. He wouldn’t leave his front door open if he wasn’t here.” I opened the door, and it opened halfway, but there was resistance, something wouldn’t let it open fully. I squeezed by, and looked down to see what was blocking the door.
… see something big on the floor at the foot of the stairs … a tumbled form… a body lying on its back…
Time began to break up into stuttered images. Somebody! A thought formed slowly in the back of my mind, “Is that Leslie?” My vision stuttered to the tumbled form’s face, and I couldn’t recognize it… who is it?” And then a dreamlike shift in the syncopated temporality and the face I saw… it was Leslie’s, and yet it wasn’t his. My mind couldn’t figure it out. Then time broke up further into still pictures: a face, a rigid arm askew, a trickle of tacky blood on the floor beneath the head, a blue cast to the skin.
“Fernando. Fernando, something bad has happened to Leslie, Fernando…” Fernando squeezed into the stairwell, “Fernando, I think … I think Leslie’s dead.” Fernando beside me, not seen by me, but felt to be there. He said urgently, “Call 911, call 911!”
The door… I had opened that door, and walked in, and for me an old reality collapsed and in the stuttering of time, a new one formed… the light that had animated Leslie’s face, that light was gone, and this new reality seemed and still seems to me, just a bit darker.
Feel for a moment the dreamlike quality of this. For 10 minutes or so, as we chat, a doorway separates Fernando and me from what is on the other side, a threshold to a completely unsuspected reality. We chat together as if a world, a reality, could not be shattered by opening a door we stand not 2 feet from, not 2 inches from. And then we walk past the door and cross a threshold.
Leslie, perhaps, also found himself on one side of a door, on a threshold he never quite imagined. And then he passed through that door that, passing through, shattered reality into vast spaciousness…
Please gently return from your meditation, open your eyes if you will…
For 25 years I had the privilege to question the nature of reality with Leslie Marenchin. My path, my investigation into the nature of reality, is replete with his questioning, skepticism, and yet openness of mind. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a complete surprise, although to me it will always remain so, that Leslie went first, tumbling down the rabbit hole, to pass through the doorway, across the threshold, into the we know not what…
but we will.
- Bruce Leutwyler