The old man sat up in his bed, waking with a start. For a moment, he was slightly disorientated. The adrenalin was still coursing through his body like a fire out of control. With a few breaths, he tried to calm himself, clenching his clammy palms together.

The old dream again. The one that had plagued him relentlessly since his return from the war over half a century ago. He couldn’t understand it! He had never been in that position in the war, nothing had ever “dropped out of a tree” to blow him up. He shook his head, trying to clear it.

The veteran, who went by the name of David, was an old man now. His youth had deserted him in the war, when he watched his friends and comrades blown to shreds in front of him, when he was forced to do the same to another set of men wearing different uniforms, and he knew that was the only difference between himself and these men. He was old, and couldn't fight the dreams like he used to. He did have wisdom and experience on his side, though he was hard-pressed to figure out how that could help. He sighed and shook his head again, and with a small sense of purpose, climbed out of bed.

He decided to walk down to the beach, which was only a street away, to clear his head. He knew not why he would do this, his worst memories were of this beach, the one he had practically grown up on. He came here and swam ever day of the summer when he was a boy, and to sit and philosophise in the winter. He figured he was 'confronting his fears' like they do in the stories. It could work, stranger things had happened. David reached the beach, and made his way to the cliff that he had always loved as a little boy. This was his home, where he had grown up where he had laughed, played, and where his mother had died. All because of him. He shuddered, trying not to think about it. He sat down on the mossy grass, and remembered.

The wind tugged at the small, tousle haired child. He ran the length of the beach and climbed the cliff that towered over the whole beach, his favourite spot to be alone. "Daffyd!" his mother called "Daffyd, get down from there!" But the boy took no notice. Why did she call him Daffyd anyway? He didn’t want to be Welsh, like his grandmother and mother. He was Australian. He wished she could just call him by his proper name, David. "Daffyd, I know you can hear me!" The cliff was very high, and David liked to climb it the dangerous way, instead of using the safe steps on the other side. He was reckless, what little boy wasn’t? When he reached the top, he sat there with his legs dangling over the precipe, staring out into the ocean, and called to his mother. "Come up here! I won't come down until you do!" So, his mother, smiling, joined him on the top of the cliff. "Come on, I'll show you!" her son said. Seeing the excitement in his eyes, she followed. David led her to the edge. His mother looked out, and he could sense the wonder in her. She hugged him to her. Suddenly, the wind picked up and David's mother was thrown off balance. She shoved him away from her, and he fell a few paces away, and stared in horror. She staggered a few paces, and fell down the cliff screaming the whole way, to meet her death below. But not before David saw what was in her eyes. Love, fear, and something else he didn't recognise until now. Acceptance.

David yelled and reached for his mother. He opened his eyes and found himself looking down the cliffs where his mother had died, nearly 80 years before. He screamed for the child who had spent his entire growing life in the care of his too-old grandparents, for his mother who had been betrayed by her son, for the war that had taken so much from everyone and everything in its path, and for the lost opportunities of his whole family, who had suffered much at the loss of their prized daughter, sister and mother.

When he was calm again, or relatively so, he looked down the cliff, as though weighing something up. He smiled, recalling the look in his mother’s eyes, the look he only recognised now, the look that he had mistaken for blame his entire life. Tears ran down his face, shown the path by the wrinkles on his face that had accumulated over his long life. He stood for a minute, teetering on the edge of the cliff, allowing the wind to sway him to and fro. With no hesitation, he threw himself over the cliff, caressed by the wind, laughing and crying the whole way down. He finally understood.