There isn’t a dry eye in All Saints Chapel on Thursday and Friday’s “General Hospital” episodes, as family, friends and colleagues gather to honor Dr. Monica Quartermaine, who passed away peacefully in her sleep last week. The emotion on screen was real — Leslie Charleson, who’d brought Monica to life since 1977, died in January at 79, making these scenes a farewell to both the character and the actress.

“It was very, very difficult to play her alive when she had already passed in real life. It extended the mourning because we had to keep her alive when she wasn’t,” says Jane Elliot, who plays Tracy Quartermaine, Monica’s sister-in-law. “I had to mourn her death twice.”

Get out the tissues — you’re going to need them. The memorial service begins quietly. Jason (Steve Burton), who was raised by Monica, waits in the chapel to greet mourners, his grief written on his face. Looking at Monica’s photo, his eyes fill with tears, and he comes to realize that living at the mansion this past year brought him and Monica closer, a time he will always cherish.

At the Quartermaine mansion — as seen in the exclusive video — Brook Lynn (Amanda Setton) tells Chase (Josh Swickard) she understands her grandmother not wanting to show her grief in public, says everyone has to mourn in their own way. Ned (Wally Kurth) flashes back to his own complicated history with Monica and admits to Olivia (Lisa LoCicero) that he still feels her presence everywhere in the house.

Slowly, the mourners arrive at the church, each remembering how Monica shaped their lives. Tracy looks at the photo of Monica and struggles with her emotions. She is deeply touched when she learns Jason’s part in honoring the woman he called his mother.

As the service begins, all eyes turn to Tracy, worried she’ll sneak off, unable to deal with the reality of Monica’s death. Will Tracy be able to put on a brave face and share her deep emotions by speaking at Monica’s service?

“She’s adamant she’s not going to do it, but there are a lot of people who really want her to do it,” Elliot says. “The question is, will someone get her to change her mind?”

“Leslie left two voids in my life,” Elliot says. “She left a void as an acting partner and a friend. Leslie and I knew each other for 60 years. We met in 1965. I was 18 and she was 20, and she was dating a boy in a play that I was in in New York City. She would come to the theater on Saturdays and hang out in my dressing room and wait for him to be done so that they could go out to dinner between shows. We would sit and gab, and she’d watch me put on my makeup. We had a lot of shared experience and stuff to talk about. And then we lost touch. And in 1978 I got hired to play Tracy [on ‘GH’] only to discover that I was to play her sister-in-law.”

Elliot and Charleson became very good friends off the set, even as their “GH” characters were constantly bickering. They took trips together, had birthday parties for each other, and when Elliot got married, Charleson gave her a wedding shower. “She was an integral part of my life…It’s hard enough to mourn somebody’s death once, but then to do it again. One was obviously the person, and the other was the character, but at a certain point they blended. You know, Monica was Leslie, and Leslie was Monica. I had shared experience with Monica, and I had shared experience with Leslie, so she left me twice.”

Monica’s death is hitting Tracy especially hard. When Tracy was introduced onto the show, her brother Alan was already married to Monica, who Tracy thought was beneath him in stature and in place in society. She mocked and diminished her for years. “And then everybody [in Tracy’s life] died — Alan died, Lila died. Edward died. And Monica and Tracy were the last two standing,” she explains.

“Monica had been the head of the hospital, and Monica had been a successful surgeon. Monica was on the board. And Tracy started to see her as an equal. Tracy had evolved over the years and was a more substantive human being and had gone through the heartbreak of losing Luke twice, and she developed a fuller personality. Because of that, she could see Monica’s weight and respected her for it.”

And now, Tracy stands alone. “It’s a huge loss for her. All of her contemporaries are gone. Her mother, her father, her brother, Luke, Gregory,” Elliot says. “I mean, Monica was it. They were the last two standing hand in hand, side by side. So losing her was like losing an arm.”