Remember how on last week’s Grey’s Anatomy we had to watch Meredith take her beloved husband, Derek Shepherd, off of life support? Well, don’t worry if you don’t because Grey’s decided to make us all endure it again. Because pain. When Meredith finally gets back to Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, she finds the docs-her friends-doing their usually morning routine. They are bantering, teasing, pouring coffee, discussing surgeries. When Meredith tries to tell them what happened to Derek, it comes out as barely more than a whisper at first. She has to repeat it two more times before anyone can really grasp what she’s saying. They are all in shock, and an exhausted and heartbroken Meredith, passes out. Well, not before she is consumed with flashbacks of that goddamn carousel, and her mother’s voice talking about losing her own love many years before.
Bailey hears the news and rushes to see Meredith, but Richard stops her because she’s crying. Meredith is being treated for dehydration, and Owen asks how Amelia is doing. Oh. Yeah. About that. Amelia doesn’t know yet because she’s in surgery and the rule is, when you are in surgery, important news has to wait. Callie joins Amelia in surgery, holding back her own tears knowing that she can’t share this info with Derek’s sister. The patient that they are working on is none other than Officer Dan Pruitt, who really wrecked himself after chasing a suspect on a roof and falling. I knew Dan would be back, just not in such dire straights.
After surgery, Owen finds Amelia washing up and gives her his best scrunched forehead and wet eyes. She knows that look means someone is dead, and she demands to know who. When he tells her that it’s Derek, she cuts him off as he offers an explanation why. “I don’t need the details, dead is dead,” she tells him, keeping her steely blue eyes on him. She gives about the same reaction one would have when they hear that McDonalds is out of Shamrock Shakes, so we know that later in the episode, she will have to deal and it will be painful as hell. The music in the episode was on point, and as Owen stares on and Callie comforts Steph who has just heard the news, Aron Wright‘s cover of “In the Sun” cries out plaintively. (Who else remembers this from The L Word?)
The funeral passes by in a flash, and at the memorial afterwards, Meredith sits quietly as the painful moments of her past play in her memory.
At Bailey and Ben’s, the couple gets into bed, where they discuss their wishes if anything ever happens to either one of them. Bailey wants no extraordinary measures, but Ben wants it all. He wants to hold out hope that one day he’d recover. As doctors who witness what they do on a daily basis, Bailey is surprised by his request.
Meredith, who can’t deal with being in a house full of memories of Derek, packs Zola and Bailey up and gets the hell out of dodge, just like her mother did with her many years ago. The carousel keeps spinning.
The docs gather at Meredith’s to figure out what to do about their missing friend. Meredith left a note that was like, “Grieving, peace out for a while” but didn’t give any info as to where she was or when she was coming back. Amelia is still acting nonchalantly, which is how some people deal with loss, but Richard is worried about her sobriety in the midst of her processing. Well, lack of processing. Callie suggests hiring a private investigator, and Maggie thinks that maybe the police should get involved, but Richard stops them right there. Meredith is an adult who made a decision and doesn’t want to be found right now. All they can do is respect her wishes. Alex tries Meredith’s phone again, but it just goes to voicemail.
Easter
We now enter the time jump section of this episode, so hold on to your scrub caps because there are a lot of them. It’s Easter now, and it’s been a couple of weeks since Meredith left. Owen is busy planning to go back to the Army and work in a field hospital for a few months, and is busy telling April how awesome it is. Of course, this appeals to April the second we see her eyes light up. Jo is on Jackson’s service as they work on a burn patient named Anne. Anne is new to the ward and is about to undergo some very painful procedures, but a voice pops up from nearby, giving her advice on how to handle it. It’s JJ, another burn patient who has been there a few weeks already. JJ’s a real jokester, which is kind of amazing considering the amount of pain she must be in. It comforts Anne in a way.
Officer Dan is looking a mess, but he’s alive. He’s at risk of losing a leg (well, that’s a familiar song, no?) and has parts of his spine fused together. Still, he can’t resist bringing up his date with Callie a few months prior. Word got back to him that he was boring, so he tries to make light of it and teases that with all these months of recoup ahead, it’s plenty of time for Callie to fall in love with him. Have we learned nothing from Denny, Dan?
After staring at some babies for a while, April decides to join Owen and work at the Army field hospital overseas. Jackson is upset but tries to be supportive as she takes off for three months. He also has a full and manly beard. They kiss and she heads off to try and be “useful.” Dammit, Owen, you ruin everything!
Memorial Day
Ben got himself in a tangle with a hornet’s nest, and as Bailey gleefully removes the stingers, talk once again returns to Ben’s desire for extraordinary measures. Ben prefers to let science run the show, rather than faith, so yes, it’s still what he wants.
In the cafeteria line, Alex, Maggie and Arizona chat about Meredith (she’s still not answering anyone’s calls) when they overhear a surgeon bitching about the fact that they are down a neuro-surgeon and how it’s cramping her style. At first Arizona tells her friends to be calm, but them Zero-Chill Robbins takes over and gives the other doctor a major tongue-lashing. Not the kind of tongue-lashing we like to see from Arizona, but badass in its own way.
Callie and Amelia are in surgery together on Dan and when Callie expresses concern about a certain procedure, Amelia pushes back that it’s not what Derek would have done, it’s actually better. So there. Callie knows better than to poke a bear, so she doesn’t argue anymore.
Anne is still in a lot of pain as Jo works with her and the layers of her skin start to heal, but this time, her husband is by her side. He doesn’t get the camaraderie that she and JJ have, as they joke about being two of the seven dwarves and JJ tries to get Anne to laugh through the pain. Anne’s husband screams at JJ to shut up, then leaves the room in a huff. JJ takes it in stride though, because these friends know that no one else can share what they are going through and it’s scary to be on the other side of it.
July 4th
Maggie and Alex watch the fireworks from his porch swing, and share their frustrations that Meredith hasn’t reached out to them. Maggie wants to try and find her, but Alex tells her that he’s spent the last couple months searching hospitals for her. Maggie is feeling pretty abandoned by her sister, even as she understands that Meredith is going through something very terrible. Alex leaves Mer a voicemail telling her to at least let them know that she’s alright. As much as Alex is Meredith’s person now, Meredith is Alex’s, too.
April calls Jackson from overseas in her cute army gear, and he’s excited because she’ll be back in just a few days. Except that she won’t. She wants to extend her service and there’s not much Jackson can do to convince her otherwise, especially since their connection is terrible. Look, I get that April is trying to heal but I know that if my wife left me for months and then decided to add more time to that separation, I’d be devastated and vice versa. I don’t blame Jackson for his frustration.
Meanwhile, Jackson’s mother Catherine and Richard are having a fancy dinner date. Richard is about to get down on one knee and propose, but Catherine stops him. She doesn’t want him to ask her since she’s not 100% sure that marriage for them is the best idea. Richard is sure and if he had it his way, there would be floor to ceiling roses and classical music. He’s stung by her rejection and suggests they go dutch on the bill.
Halloween
Holy shit, that’s a big time jump. Ben and Bailey are watching scary movies, eating popcorn and still arguing about extraordinary measures. Ben thinks he’s “the miracle man,” so he laughs in the face of death! Ha ha!
Amelia and Steph are working together, and Steph can’t handle the jokes that Amelia makes about Derek’s death. She suggests that Amelia attend a grief group, and she’ll even go along. Amelia thinks she’s doing just fine, and she’ll continue to use her brother as a punchline as long as she wants to.
Jackson and Anne discuss the next phase in her recovery, which are skin grafts. She needs to wait until an infection in her nose clears up however, which is disappointing. The light is gone from Jackson’s eyes, especially when his phone rings and he declines a call from April. Sheesh, that’s not good.
Thanksgiving
Jo is not culinarily inclined, so as a very undercooked turkey lingers in the over, Alex comes to the rescue with burgers. Maggie, who is not full from eating the pumpkin pie, devours it. She’s all like, “Didn’t your mom teach you how to roast a turkey?” and Jo is like, “Um, I lived in a van down by the river, so no.” Alex decides to make a call to Meredith and she actually picks up! She tells him she’s fine and to leave her alone, but hey, she answered!
Christmas
Callie works with Dan for a bit, who is busy cracking jokes about his amputation. I’m not sure if this is supposed to harken back to how Arizona felt the opposite about her own amputation, or what. But Dan has it bad for Callie and even takes her hand as she’s explaining her holiday custody schedule. Smooth. He tries to say that he was meant to meet her, but she cuts him off right there, saying that sometimes patients become attached to their doctors. He tells her that he just meant as his doctor, he was meant to meet her, and she’s embarrassed for assuming otherwise. (Which he did. Come on, it’s totes obvious and who can blame the guy? It’s Callie.) He thanks her and swears that he wouldn’t have made it if it hadn’t been for her.
Ben and Bailey get ready for Christmas with Tuck, and the kid’s got an endless amount of presents to open. Bailey brings up the extraordinary measures thing again, and hypothesizes what if she met Idris Elba. She’d feel like she couldn’t start again with Idris, if Ben was hanging on in a vegetative state. “You taking away my Idris chance!” God I love her.
At Alex’s Depressing Holiday Jamboree, Arizona, Maggie, Jackson and Alex are eating pizza and getting turnt on eggnog. Arizona even slurs her way through the reasons for their pathetic Xmas tree. Richard shows up with a yule log just as April calls in. Jackson sits on the stairs as April stumbles through an explanation for not coming home. Just as she starts to talk about how they were supposed to celebrate their first Xmas with their child, there’s a commotion and gunfire and Jackson loses the connection with April. Jackson is left in a panic.
Back on the burn ward, Anne is a wreck because her husband decided that Xmas was the perfect time to tell her that he’s leaving her. JJ is right there for her friend, and soothes her with words of affection and friendship. This is their Xmas to start over! I swear these two are my new OTP on this show. They sing Xmas songs, well after picking one that doesn’t remind them of burns or noses, and the women and Jo sing to each other in solidarity.
Callie spends Xmas eve with Sofia, who is now a grad student I believe. She hangs the stockings with care, looking with a little sadness at Arizona’s stocking, which gets placed back in the plastic tub. Why must they torture us so?
Also celebrating Xmas eve is….Meredith! She tucks an adorably precocious Zola into bed, promising presents in the morning, and when she gets up we see she is hella pregnant. Whoa. As Meredith leaves, Zola says, “I wish daddy were here.” Oh sweetie I know. So do at least 50, 000 people who signed a petition. And me. I wish Derek were there too.
The next time we see Meredith, she’s on the beach with Bailey and Zola. She keeps having images of Ellis at her age, talking about the carousel and how difficult something is to do, and of course, Derek.
New Year’s Day
It’s been a week and Jackson still can’t reach April. He’s understandably worried, but he can’t get any info from the Army as to where she is. Arizona comes in to check on him and lay down some insight.
“She lost a leg. Everything that happened this past year with you and your baby, she lost a leg. And she’s learning how to walk again…and you have to let her do that.”
Jackson doesn’t buy that, since he’s been grieving too. He doesn’t think it’s fair, and doesn’t want his last moment with April to be one of him yelling at her via Skype.
Catherine joins Bailey in a surgery, and is complaining about Richard’s romantic nature, when Maggie steps in and gives her two cents. Maybe by not allowing Richard to give her the romantic proposal that he wanted, she’s actually taking away something meaningful for him. #truth
Jo pops into the burn ward to do her thing when Anne tells her to let JJ rest as they were up all night talking and ringing in the New Year. When Jo goes to check on JJ, she finds that she has passed away in the night. Jo’s devastated and has to tell Anne the terrible news. Dammit, Grey’s. Dammit all to hell.
Some time later, Meredith flashes to her life with Derek, and the times he comforted her when she was breaking. How he wanted to spend his life with her, and to die an old man in her arms.
Callie works with Dan who has a new bionic leg that sounds like the Terminator’s. He’s doing really well with it, and she’s thrilled…and then she starts to cry. She tells him how the sensors that are helping this leg to connect to his brain were created by Derek, a brilliant person who was also her friend. It may be the first time Callie’s been able to really grieve his loss.
In the burn ward, a new patient comes in named Laura. As Jo goes to remove some dead skin, Anne’s voice pops up just like JJ’s, giving Laura advice on how to deal with the pain. This right here has been the heart of the episode for me. Oh yeah, and April shows up too and Jackson hugs the hell out of her.
Richard runs into Amelia and asks her for a cup of coffee, but she turns him down. She practically lives at the hospital now and hasn’t been attending AA meetings. Amelia just snaps, telling Richard that she needs to be there always in case a patient needs her. If she leaves for even an hour, what if one of them died because she wasn’t there. Like what happened to Derek. Our poor girl Amelia is running herself into the ground, trying to save others from Derek’s fate. Richard just lets her go off, because he gets it. Then Owen walks in, waggles his eyebrows and stands there.
Later on, Owen finds Amelia pacing at the MerDer mansion. She’s hit her breaking point, and she has a bag full of Oxy to prove it. She talks about how everyone was expecting her to fall apart, but she didn’t, even if all the men in her life have died. She delivers a heartbreaking monologue, as she crumbles more and more. Owen tells her that we are supposed to feel pain and hope and all the awful, wonderful things that life sends our way. I’d like to chastise Owen here, but he does have a point. He’s been there too. Amelia hands him the baggie and opens up her heart, finally. A sob cries out from within the depths of her soul, and Owen holds her.
There’s a flashback to when Ellis is talking to the adoption services woman, signing away her rights to Maggie. Just then it flashes to Meredith and Zola. Meredith is having some serious pain and she starts bleeding on the kitchen floor, just like she saw when she was a little girl. And just like Meredith, Zola has to call 911 for her mother. They are all rushed to the hospital where Meredith is taken into the OR. When Meredith wakes up, the nurse tells her that her husband is there, but it’s actually Alex. He was her emergency contact, so he has finally found her. She tells him about her beautiful (enormous!) baby named Ellis and how she can see Derek in her and that makes her happy.
Valentine’s Day
Ben and Bailey have just made sweet, sweet love in front of a roaring fire when Ben hands Bailey the least romantic V-Day gift ever: a signed DNR. While Ben thinks he’s finally giving Bailey what she wants, Bailey bursts into tears thinking that her husband could one day be taken from her and he no longer wants to fight for their future. “You no longer love me enough to hope for a miracle?” She loves Ben so much and can’t bear the thought of losing him. She’s been having panic attacks since Derek died, that she’d lose Ben one day. He feels the same way, so they decide to put their fears aside for the night and enjoy the holiday.
Richard gets a hell of a surprise from his lady when Catherine calls out to him from a staircase full of red roses and twinkle lights. She puts it all on the line and asks him to marry her, and he of course says yes as a string quartet starts to play and everyone starts to applaud.
Son of a bitch, another cover of “Chasing Cars” starts as Alex escorts Meredith and the kids back home. He takes the kids to their rooms as Meredith takes in the whole damn thing. It’s bracing, looking at this house that was their home, and will be again. The same one that Derek built for them, but will never step foot in again. She walks into their bedroom, where the Post-It hangs above their bed, but she can’t deal so she turns off the light and walks out. She spends many sleepless nights in the house, until one day, sleep comes and so does her re-entry back into her life. She finds Derek’s ferry boat scrub cap, and ties it on her own head.
This episode should have made me cry, but it didn’t. I fully expected it to. I had the tissues at the ready. Instead, at the end, I just felt…exhausted. Between the time jumps and the disjointed stories, and that nagging feeling that we were supposed to be emotional wrecks about it, I ended up not really feeling much of anything. What about you? How did you feel about this episode?
Here are our favorite #greysgays tweets from “She’s Leaving Home”.
Chasing cars again. Why?! These damn feels. #GreysAnatomy #GreysGays
– Emily Hessell (@ekhessell) May 1, 2015
Callie, remember when you wanted to build a bionic leg for Arizona? Maybe not cause with this timeline that was 60 years ago. #GreysGays
– Lady Liberty (@CindyLMarshall) May 1, 2015
I just held hands with my cat for the last 10 minutes of the episode. #GreysAnatomy #GreysGays
– Kimmy Krenzer (@MusclesKrenzer) May 1, 2015
That baby’s name better be Ellis Cristina Shephard! #GreysAnatomy #greysgays
– Samantha J. Green (@SamanthaJGreen) May 1, 2015
Am I the only one who hopes the two burn victims end up together? #queerproblems #GreysAnatomy #GreysGays
– Marilee Hicks (@marileehicks) May 1, 2015
Amy is acting her ass off, and I only wish I’d watched #PrivatePractice so I could care more about her #GreysAnatomy #greysgays
– Samantha J. Green (@SamanthaJGreen) May 1, 2015
Good lord did Meredith keep that child in for longer than she should have? Is that why it’s so big? #GreysAnatomy #GreysGays
– TheOtherNic (@CloneNic) May 1, 2015
Thanks to #GreysAnatomy, Alvin & the Chipmunks could sing Chasing Cars and I’d still cry. @ShortlandTweet #greysgays
– Carrie (@Carrie1789) May 1, 2015
I was hoping beyond hope that losing Derek would make #Calzona realize they can’t lose each other sigh -_- #GreysGays
– Odilia Aguayo (@odieaguayo) May 1, 2015
*Pssst* Ben… next time…. Go to Jared… #GreysGays #GreysAnatomy #HeDidNOTGoToJared
– B (@dcharmingone69) May 1, 2015
HOLY SHIT. HOLY SHIT. IT WAS FORESHADOWING, NOT JUST STRESS VOMITING. #GreysAnatomy #GreysGays
– Kitty (@SmartLittleLiar) May 1, 2015
Getting whiplash from how fast this episode is moving. Also, why so little Arizona? #greysgays
– Jennifer (@JenKasper81) May 1, 2015
God bless Arizona Robbins. May she never go anywhere ever. #GreysGays
– Maggie Jacqueline (@unsaltysaltines) May 1, 2015
