Now Dorothy is giving a masterclass in dealing with unwelcome news. She is sitting down. Why didn’t I sit down? She has taken Mrs de Souza’s hand in hers and she is stroking Mrs de Souza’s shoulder with her other hand. I know Dorothy has three patients in the observation unit who are all very sick, and that she can’t spend much time here, and yet here she is bending time, extending it by sounding unhurried, making every second count as she focuses her attention on Mrs de Souza.

‘This is very shocking, my love,’ she purrs to Mrs de Souza. ‘Very shocking. Did you know he had a bad heart?’ Mrs de Souza lifts her head and takes a sobbing breath. Dorothy hands her a tissue from the box on the table. Mrs de Souza blows her nose, then says, ‘He’s had a bad heart for years. He was in here with his first heart attack a couple of years ago and we nearly lost him. He’s had more pains recently, that angina pain, and the doctor changed his tablets …’ She trails off.

‘Were you worrying about him?’ asks Dorothy, a question I can see reaching to the weeping woman’s soul.

‘He wouldn’t rest,’ Mrs de Souza sighs. ‘He worked too hard. I told him he was lucky to survive last time.’

‘So you thought he might die last time?’ asks Dorothy, gently, and Mrs de Souza stares into the middle distance, mopping her eyes and nodding.

‘I think we’ve been on borrowed time,’ she whispers. Dorothy waits. ‘He wasn’t well this morning: stressed by something at work, he looked grey and I told him to stay off, but …’ and she shakes her head, weeping more quietly now, sorrow instead of shock, sadness in place of anger.

It is fascinating to watch the way Dorothy has used questions to help Mrs de Souza step from her knowledge of her husband’s heart disease, past his first heart attack, into her recent worries about his health and to her very specific concern this morning. She has built a bridge for Mrs de Souza to walk across, and in answering Dorothy’s questions Mrs de Souza has prepared herself for this unwanted and yet not entirely unexpected moment. She has told Dorothy the Story So Far.

‘I am so sorry, my love,’ says Dorothy. ‘He wasn’t conscious when the ambulance arrived, and his heart was beating very slowly at first and then it stopped. The team did all they could …’ She pauses again, and in that pause I see the path I could have taken: a conversation about the past, the wife’s concerns, her worry today. I was so busy making sure I told her the dreadful news that I didn’t bring her to a place where she could receive it. Dorothy has wound back the story and then brought her, step by step, to this place: now we can move forward a little further.

‘Would you like to come with me to see him?’ asks Dorothy. ‘He’s lying on a bed around the corner, and you can sit with him there if you would like to.

‘Would you like us to contact somebody for you? Your family? A priest? Anyone who can support you here?’

Mrs de Souza says she would like a Catholic priest to be called, and Dorothy takes her by the hand to lead her from the room. As they pass me, Dorothy says, ‘Make us a cup of tea, we’ll be in cubicle three. Bring one for yourself, too.’

Then Dorothy takes Mrs de Souza to sit with her dead husband. When I deliver the tea, Mrs de Souza thanks me Dorothy has reconstructed the whole transaction, skilfully yet simply, by using gentle questions about what Mrs de Souza knew, to help her to recognize that she was already expecting bad news.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s asking someone out on a date or talking about our funeral arrangements with our dear ones: sometimes our own emotions and sometimes our concern about theirs hold us back. Finding a way to begin that allows both people in the conversation to feel confident of being respected and heard sets a tone of collaboration for the rest of the discussion.

It’s stories, not rules, that change people.

To get started, we need to bear in mind whether the circumstances are right. ‘Right’ has to mean ‘good enough’, because we’ll never find the perfect moment. If the time is right, and the setting allows us a chance to talk, that is probably about as good as it gets. The style guide has two pieces of wisdom here: the first is that the other person has a right to choose, too.

Miller columns (also known as cascading lists) are a browsing/visualization technique that can be applied to tree structures. The columns allow multiple levels of the hierarchy to be open at once, and provide a visual representation of the current location. It is closely related to techniques used earlier in the Smalltalk browser, but was independently invented by Mark S. Miller in 1980 at Yale University.[citation needed] The technique was then used at Project Xanadu, Datapoint, and NeXT.

Charles replying to Mabel It makes perfect sense, we just can't make sense of it!