"Sweetie, vampires don't cry regular tears. So when you cry, you're gonna cry blood from now on." Jessica shudders -- We what? My body WHAT?" -- but her question is salient indeed: "Well, why do you know that and I don't? I mean, don't you think I should know this about myself?" "Bill should probably have told you," Sookie says, but of course in this particular frame, in this moment of the metaphor, he'd rather have died. He would have fled, and left it to Sookie anyway. Jessica holds out her bloody hands, blood smeared all over her face, eyes bugging out with offense at the entire situation: "Jeez, ya think?"

Jessica flops around with that sound she makes, the angry upset squeak, and Sookie hands her a tissue before returning to the reason for the tears, and not the tears themselves, because Sookie has learned something very profound in the last month, something that it took me a long time to figure out: we miss people uncategorically, if we're going to, when they're not around. You move away from your grandparents, or a childhood friend, and you miss them. It aches. And maybe you see them again, maybe you don't, but the pain is the same. And the only difference with death is that there's never going to be another visit. The pain is still the same, but it extends its parabola out into infinity. Never goes away, but it gets easier. They're somewhere else, just like they were when you both lived in separate places.

And so Sookie tries to apply this, correctly, to Jessica's situation: she is dead, like Gran is dead, but who lives and who dies -- in this world where death is just crossing state lines -- is not as important as the line that divides them. Dead Like Me, at least the superior first season, was about this: we mourn the dead, and in worlds like these, the dead mourn us. It's not the state you're in, but the line between you. "When people love each other, and then suddenly one of them isn't there anymore, it's the distance that hurts. And the distance is the same no matter who's doing the leaving." Jessica slowly admits the possibility that Sookie can actually understand -- the only thing teenagers want, proof that they're not the only person who ever felt something, the promise it will get better added to the authenticity that you're not just handing them fake sympathy -- and before you know it, she's made the jump to asking for help. "What do you do when you feel so far away you can't stand it?"