Faces in the Water

These old people sit at the special table, have cream on their pudding, and are hurried early to their rooms, undressed, put to bed and locked in. Immediately the nurse is gone they get out of bed and potter around the room making sure looking for things seeing to things. They continue thus, restlessly, most of the night and in the morning after only fitful sleep, sometimes with their beds wet and dirty, they begin again to solve the puzzle of being where they are, of not being allowed to go outside, of losing their garters and their handkerchiefs and of being involved in the complexities of going from one place to another, of going to the lavatory and remembering to wipe themselves, of being led from dayroom to meal table and back again.

The old women will eventually be put to bed for the last time; they will lie in the dreary sunless rooms that stink of urine; they will washed and "turned" daily, and the film, the final deception, will grow over their eyes. And one morning, if you walk down the corridor through Ward One, you will see in the small room where one of the old women has been sleeping, the floor newly scrubbed smelling of disinfectant, the bed stripped, the mattress turned back to air; the vacancy created in the night by death.

Faces in the Water, Janet Frame, pp.60-1

Maggie died in 1959.