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Sam knew grief. He knew it when he learned the truth about his mother’s death. Knew it when he saw his brother broken and bruised, time and time again, unable to do a thing to stop it. Knew it when he saw his father beaten by the same fate. And Jessica…
He thought of Jessica, thought of a life he had once dreamt of. Those tender, innocent feelings. A chance he thought he had, at a normal apple-pie life. A home, a wife, a white picket fence, and two kids; a girl and a boy. A life that did not involve monsters, or hunting or his father, or Dean. He had thought he could pretend, pretend he was normal, that he could go to Stanford, go far ahead in life; so far ahead that everything else would just get left behind.
Those were his selfish desires, and poor Jessica was the one who paid the price.
Because now what was she? A corpse?
Just another painful memory. Another ghost of his suffocating past.
That life he had wanted with her was a dream, Jessica herself was a dream, a mere dream, and Sam Winchester was forever doomed to wake up in a nightmare.
And now even Dean was gone, lost to the deepest pits of hell.
Deep down, Sam knew, this was inevitable. Knew the borrowed time they were living on would run out, snatched out of their hands on a minute’s notice, because they were the Winchesters; and they were born cursed.
They were the Winchesters, and for people like them, there was no reward here, and no salvation there.
At the end of all things, Sam knew that was all his life was; a painful past, a hopeless present, an uncertain future.
He got up, people like him didn’t have the luxury to grieve, time to get to work.