"You and I are light, you and I are love, you and I are one."
So concludes George Schwimmer in his recently published book, "The Search For David," a project he began almost 20 years ago to chronicle his quest for meaning behind his son David's drowning death in January 1978. David, who was a sophomore at the University when he died, was on leave for the spring semester in 1978 to participate in an Outward Bound kayaking course in Mexico. His kayak capsized during an unexpected storm in the Sea of Cortez.
"[My] search," Schwimmer writes in the book's preface, "is the search on which we are all embarked, and its destination is one we have always known.... That search is the search for ourselves and who we really are."
In the book, Schwimmer details how he unearthed exactly what happened in Mexico, the ensuing successful negligence law suit against Southwest Outward Bound in which the family was awarded $60,000 and the guidance he received from his son's spirit.
Schwimmer said that during the course of his search he learned, above all else, to love others. "It was really one commandment that Jesus came to give us and that was to love each other," Schwimmer said, "...and that was David's message."
David attended the University for three semesters and was active in Project WILD. He was "the kind of kid that wanted to make others happy," said Keith Trider, the student leader of David's crew in Baja, who is currently self-employed and living outside of Boston, Mass.
Thanks to his journey to explain David's death, Schwimmer said he now characterizes his beliefs as spiritual, not religious. "There is a God and we all are spiritual beings that happen to be physically living on this planet," he said. "We come to this earth with a degree of structure but we do have free will."
One of David's former roommates, Dale DeNunzio, who ultimately earned his masters degree and doctorate in marriage and family therapy from Syracuse University, also subscribes to many of Schwimmer's spiritual beliefs. DeNunzio remembers David as helpful, loyal and energetic-but also undisciplined. "If he thought an assignment wasn't worth doing, he'd blow it off," DeNunzio noted.
DeNunzio recalled a particular episode that epitomized David's amusing irresponsibility and appealing sense of humor. One afternoon while at Duke, he recounted, he and David had plans for lunch-but David did not return until late that afternoon. While turning in an assignment, David explained to DeNunzio, he had seen his grandfather and remembered that the two of them also had lunch plans. So he ate with his grandfather.
David was an irresponsible youth, DeNunzio said, but he was also a good friend. "I had a close friendship with David with a lot of ups and downs-our common bond was our belief in the spiritual.... David was in touch with a lot of deeper levels." Among the concepts they shared a belief in were reincarnation, mysticism and the after-life.
George Schwimmer, himself an authority on past-life therapy, devoted significant space in his book to a discussion on past-lives and reincarnation. "The whole basis of everything about reincarnation," Schwimmer said, "is that we come back for a reason... [and] we teach what we need to learn."
The purpose of David's death, as Schwimmer understands it, has been to teach him how to love. If all people followed this commandment to love, Schwimmer said, every problem could be solved-from fighting in the Middle East to world wars to a disagreement with one's spouse.
Trider, the student leader of David's crew in Mexico, said he is only mildly interested in the ideas about reincarnation and does not subscribe to such beliefs as strongly as Schwimmer. "I suppose we'd all like to believe in it on some level," he said. "It's a little easier to accept death."
In the book, Schwimmer reported strange coincidences and occurrences connected to David after his death, which he believes to be the actions of David's spirit. Throughout his journey in writing the book, Schwimmer consulted numerous psychics, whom he said he believes serve as the connection between individuals who have died-or, to be more spiritually correct, passed on to "another plane." Many of these psychics, Schwimmer said, reported a pain in their left skull, the spot where David's head hit a rock after his kayak capsized. The psychics also saw water, the scene of David's death; they named people connected with David; and depicted him as a record-keeper, suggestive of his job at the Duke Library Record Section.
DeNunzio said he believes David's spirit is still active and that he has communicated with it on occasion. "David has appeared in my dreams on my birthday," he said. "He was sending me a message seven years afterward-that he recognized that it was my birthday, that he was still with me, still guiding me from the other side."
The book's dedication reads, "Dedicated to David and to all those who have helped me with my search in this life and in other lives." For George Schwimmer, the guidance David's spirit has provided him lies at the heart of his book and his quest-a personal quest that has spanned nearly two decades and will continue indefinitely.
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