One thing he’d learned in prison was that the other old-timers all shared the same fear, not of dying while incarcerated but of losing people, of getting that call that mothers or brothers had passed and that their own fuckups had kept them away at the end.

[…] She’d held on longer than expected, gave the cancer the fight of its life, but had passed just months before Malort was set to be released. But of course she had; this was all a cosmic joke from start to finish. When Malort had gotten the news over the phone, he’d started bawling, and the huge Mexican dude on the next phone over came and put an arm around him, and there was silence all around. Everybody in there knew that the single thing that scared them most had happened right in front of them, that a man had lost the one most precious to him and that he hadn’t been by her side at the end, hadn’t said goodbye.

— Malort in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 5, p. 368-369