Reviewed by Charles Ashbacher for Readers' Favorite

The job of a social worker dealing with people in hospice care has the potential to be depressing, for every person there generally only has months to live. Furthermore, most of the patients are experiencing severe pain and/or disabilities, so they can be difficult to work with and require significant care. Working with them also means that you have to be willing to accept their lapses of memory and difficult circumstances. While your bad day may mean getting stuck in traffic, their bad day could mean being unable to move or suffering from terrible pain.

In My Little People: A Social Worker's Journey by Annie Clara Brown, the author has clearly managed to maintain a positive outlook and a cheery disposition through her years as social worker involved in providing quality hospice care. She relates many happy stories involving the patients she dealt with, some of them upbeat to the very end. While some of the patients were angry, many times military veterans of conflict, a great deal of them decided to spend their last times laughing and joking, seemingly unwilling to take their imminent death seriously. At times, the points of the jokes are completely made up in the mind of a patient suffering from dementia, which appears to be an effective way to cope with such patients. I once knew a psychiatric nurse and she told me about her work with Alzheimer’s patients and how depressing it could be.

The title of this well structured work is derived from Ms. Brown’s interaction with a patient with dementia who lacked any real sense of elapsed time, always thinking that the time between visits was far longer than it was. One time when the patient asked Ms. Brown where she had been, she replied that she had been visiting her little people. The patient responded with “Your little people, your little people, you always have to go see your little people” - and that was her standard greeting from that point on. In many visits that was the only lucid thing the patient said. One thing comes through very clearly in reading Ms. Brown’s account - if you ever find yourself going into hospice care, you want her or her twin sister to be a part of the planning and organizing of your treatment.