- Jackson struggles to understand April's decision; Ben & Bailey discuss their future; a patient revisits Callie; Amelia tries to deal with her past.
- Meredith reveals the news of Derek's death at the hospital, with everyone taking it hard except Amelia, who hides behind morbid jokes about her brother being dead. After the funeral, Meredith goes AWOL after leaving a note. Bailey and Ben discuss their different opinions about extraordinary measures if anything happens to them. Catherine rejects Richard's proposal before he can even ask her. Dan, Callie's chief of police one-time date, is admitted to the hospital after an accident. Owen and April go overseas for a planned three-month military surgical training program, but April keeps extending her leave despite Jackson's pleas for her to come home. Jackson and Jo work on a pair of burn victims who bond over their circumstances.—Meredith
- Meredith gets back to Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital and everything looks and feels different, but everyone is carrying on as usual. Meredith says, "Derek is dead" a few times before anyone really hears her. When she's heard, everything stops. Meredith is flashing back to hearing her mother talk about having lost the love of her life and to the moment when she was left at the carousel. Then she faints.
Bailey is in tears and Hunt is surprised to hear that Amelia doesn't know yet. She's in surgery and there's protocol that needs to be followed. Callie joins Amelia in surgery and is shaken, but doesn't say anything about Derek. Callie recognizes the patient as Dan Pruitt because she treated him a while back. After surgery, Hunt comes to the O.R. and his silence says it all. She asks him, "Who died?" She tries to seem strong, saying she knows "the drill" and "it's not a big deal," and she rejects Hunt's effort to hug.
Derek's funeral comes and goes and Meredith is still stunned. That night, Bailey and Ben talk and she says she doesn't want to be hooked up to machines if anything happens to her. Ben says he wants to live and wants all measures exhausted -- "the more extraordinary the better." She's surprised and they're going to keep talking about it.
Just like her mother did years earlier, Meredith packs up the kids and leaves. The doctors are all at the house wondering where she went. They discuss hiring a detective or calling the police. She left a note saying she and the kids are fine, and Webber tells them that Meredith has chosen to leave. She's not missing, and he sees the connection to what Ellis did when she left Seattle.
It's now Easter and Hunt is telling April about going to some other job for a while and leaving Webber as interim chief. Jackson preps Jo to work on a woman who has burns on 60 percent of her body. Callie, meanwhile, is working on Dan, who wasn't a previous patient but a guy she dated once and didn't call back. He teases her about having heard that she thought he was boring.
April looks at the babies in the nursery by herself, and we next see that she's at the airport about to take off for a three-month service with the Army -- joining Hunt -- where she's excited to learn new surgical techniques. Jackson doesn't like it, but he kisses her goodbye and watches her leave.
It's now Memorial Day and Bailey is pulling hornet stingers out of Ben's back. He screams in pain and Bailey teases him about wanting extraordinary measures instead of "letting Jesus take the wheel." He tells her science is driving if anything happens to him.
Arizona, Alex and Pierce are in the cafeteria still lamenting not having heard from Meredith. They overhear a doctor talking about how irresponsible it is that the board hasn't hired a new neurosurgeon yet. Pierce tells Arizona not to make a scene, but she does, yelling at the doctor about how she's sorry that Derek's death had made things inconvenient for her.
It's now the Fourth of July and Meredith still hasn't shown up. Pierce and Alex are up together to watch the fireworks and wondering where Meredith might be. Pierce laments the fact that Meredith left just when she'd arrived in Seattle to find out about her family. Alex calls Meredith and leaves one more message asking her to call and let them know if she's safe. April FaceTime's Jackson to let him know that she's not coming back in a week, as they'd planned. He's not happy.
Out at a fancy dinner, Webber tells Catherine how happy she makes him and starts to propose, but she stops him from doing what she thinks he's about to do. She says they're old enough to not get caught up in the romance. But he insists it should be romantic and he's frustrated that she doesn't seem to agree. He angrily quips, "I take it we're splitting the check."
All these months later, Ben and Bailey are still having their back and forth about life support.
Amelia jokes about some sloppy surgical work by another surgeon and jokes about how Derek would "roll over in his grave" if he saw it. Stephanie asks her to stop because Amelia's flip comments about Derek are making her uncomfortable. She suggests some grief support groups and Amelia blows her off -- with a smile.
The burn victim's husband seems to be showing up less, and she's disappointed when Jackson tells her it might be a little while before they start working on the skin grafts for her face. Jackson's phone rings and it's April -- and he doesn't answer.
It's now Thanksgiving. Jo's turkey is cooking too slowly. Alex tries Meredith again and is surprised when she answers the FaceTime call. She quickly says she's fine and the kids are fine, and asks him to "please stop calling." She hangs up.
Dan is still working on winning Callie over and he thanks Callie for helping him through his leg amputation.
Now it's Christmas and Ben and Bailey keep their conversation going, with Bailey suggesting that she could be missing out on hooking up with Idris Elba one day because Ben might be technically still alive hooked up to life support machines.
Arizona is sad because Sophia keeps asking when she's going to see Zola, and she got Zola a Christmas present. Jackson comes over and gets a FaceTime call from April and tells her she should be home for Christmas. Things get chaotic and it sounds like an explosion in the background before the call cuts off.
Ann, the burn victim, has been left by her husband and her neighboring patient, a woman named J.J., who has been helping her through the recovery, tries to convince her that her husband wasn't good enough for her anyway. The mood lightens up and they start to sing Christmas songs -- except Ann calls off songs about roasting (chestnuts) and noses (Rudolph). They sing "I'll Be Home for Christmas," and we see a montage of everyone having their Christmases. We end on Meredith convincing Zola to go to sleep to that will come. Meredith stands up and we see that she's pregnant. Zola says she wishes "daddy" was there. Meredith says goodnight.
Meredith sits on the beach watching Zola play and flashes back to moments with her mother and Derek -- and Amelia telling her that she's never lost someone she loved.
It's now New Year's Day and Jackson is trying to find out what happened to April's unit. Arizona tries to comfort him through April going through her grieving process.
Bailey and Catherine talk to each other about the conversations they've each been having for months. Bailey about Ben's life-support thing and Catherine about Webber's romance thing. Stephanie weighs in and tells Catherine the romance thing isn't about her, and that she should just accept the flowers from Webber because it makes him feel good.
Jo comes to check on Ann and J.J. and Ann tells her that they were up all night talking. She wants Jo to let J.J. sleep, but Jo peeks in anyway and finds that J.J. is dead. Ann falls apart when she figures out what's happened and says she can't continue to go through this alone.
Meredith stands on the beach now, thinking back to times in her life when she was overwhelmed with sadness, and Derek was there to help her through it. And she thinks about times when they were full of passion, and when they were apart, and when they reconnected.
Callie helps Dan take his first few steps with a prosthetic leg that she developed with Derek making the brain monitors. She gets emotional and explains to Dan that Derek would have loved to see that moment.
Ann gets a new neighbor, a new burn patient who she is able to help through her treatments the way J.J. helped her.
April shows up and Jackson gives her a big hug. Webber asks Amelia about missing meetings and invites her for a cup of coffee because Stephanie mentioned something about how she's been flip about Derek. Amelia finally loses it, going on a tirade about how she has to work to save people because it's the families and friends of the patients who will hate her if she can't save them. She also mentions the "pi-dunk doctors in pi-dunk hospitals" who couldn't save Derek. Everyone around stops and notices -- and she looks up to see Hunt standing there in his Army uniform.
Later, Hunt pays a visit to see how she's doing, but it doesn't seem like she wants him around. As he's leaving, she says she has a baggie full of black-market Oxy in her pocket and that she's trying to decide whether to take it. She says she's handling the "dead Derek thing" really well. She gives another speech about how she's working and managing all of it, despite the fact that every man she's ever loved -- including her baby -- has died. Hunt finally tells her she needs to work through the pain rather than "managing" it with drugs. He realizes that he, too, was running away from the pain and he tells her not to suppress it. She starts to cry and says she can't deal with it, but he convinces her hand over the bag of Oxy. She breaks down crying.
Meredith starts to have pain in her stomach and, doubling over, she starts bleeding. Zola calls 911 and asks for help just as Meredith did when her mom tried to kill herself. Meredith has also been flashing back to the moment when her mom decided to give Pierce up for adoption.
The next morning, Alex shows up at the hospital and tells Meredith, "Apparently I'm your emergency contact." She thinks again about losing Derek, and her new baby being brought to her. She tells Alex the baby's name is Ellis.
Now it's Valentine's Day and Ben gives Bailey a gift: His will that gives her permission to pull the plug whenever she sees fit. She's upset, apparently because she's bought into his idea that he might be the miracle person who actually comes back from life support. She's upset because she loves him too much to know she'll be OK without him. He changes gears on the whole conversation by promising her that he'll let her die first. She puts the will aside and says they should just not think about it for a while.
Catherine, who has lit up a staircase with lights, declares loudly that she loves Webber and asks him to be her husband. A whole lot of people are standing around and waiting to see what he's going to say. He stands in front of her, crosses his arms and says, "Well, about damn time." Everyone cheers.
Meredith comes back to her empty house, and Alex helps get the kids settled in. She looks around at her empty bedroom for a moment, then turns off the lights. The days go on and the other half of her bed remains empty, but Amelia is there helping take care of the kids. Later, Meredith has pizza and beer with Alex and Pierce and gets caught up on everything she missed. Soon enough, she goes back to work with some trepidation. She finds Derek's coat hanging in the closet and takes his scrub cap from the pocket. She puts it on, scrubs into her first surgery and makes the first cut.
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