Eye Eye Eye

S08E10

Okay, peeps, I had to actually take a break and call a friend to decompress after this episode before I could sit down and write about it. I have no idea how writing the actual recap is going to go, but it's going to involve lots of Kleenex. We pick up exactly where we left off in November -- Henry has died, they can't tell Teddy because she's elbow deep in a heart, and Alex and Meredith are staring at what I thought were bodies in the road after a vehicle hits their ambulance. It turns out that actually, all but one of those bodies are actually still alive, though some just barely. It is a family -- Mom, Dad, Grandma, and three kids, and everyone is injured except for the oldest daughter. Unfortunately, Grandma dies at the scene. Oh, and the younger daughter has a GIANT PIECE OF GLASS THROUGH HER EYE. Help finally arrives and they get everyone to the hospital.

Once there, Alex is totally manic as he tries to help Arizona treat the baby they had been transporting. She recognizes that he is exhausted and needs to be examined since he was in an accident, and tells him that he did an amazing job in the field and now needs to hand the case over to her. Alex fights it but she puts her foot down. He leaves for a little while but finally can't take it and goes back; when she finds him he points out that he's just been through a ton to save this baby and can't just walk away. She finally agrees to let him back on the case, they do surgery, and baby does great. Afterwards, Alex freaks out that he forgot a step in the surgery but Arizona reminds him that he actually did it, and if he can't remember it he really, truly, needs to go rest.

As for the family, Mom winds up dying pretty soon after they arrive at the hospital and her eldest daughter, Lily, sees the whole thing happen through a window. Meredith tries to comfort Lily and keep her updated on what's going on with all of her other family members. Because they need an extra set of hands, Mark calls his girlfriend (the one Lexie hit with a softball) to help him and Derek get the glass out of the Lily's sister's eye. She comes in and takes charge, and awesomely manages to do the impossible and save the eye. Lexie assists with the surgery and hates every moment of it but afterwards, when talking with her, is bummed to find out that she's actually really nice and likable. Bailey, Meredith, and Dr. Ben are working on Lily's brother, whose legs were crushed. He has some sort of horrible reaction to the anesthesia, I think related to hypothermia, though don't quote me on that. Ben immediately realizes what is wrong and saves the day, to Bailey's annoyance. After the surgery, though, the two finally talk, she apologizes for snapping at him, and they sit together and are totally awesomely adorable. Oh, and they did save the little boy. Lily has been sitting with her father while all this is going on, and he keeps coding and needing his heart shocked back to life. She and Meredith have a talk about extraordinary measures and how her father is pretty much slowly dying. Lily reveals that today is her birthday (good grief) and she is now four hours into being 18 years old. This means she is now the head of the family, and she signs a DNR so that they can let him go peacefully.

Because all of this wasn't enough of a laugh riot, we also have Teddy, still working away on the heart that Jackson accidentally shredded. Things keep going wrong and she tells Owen that she has to have Cristina's help to save the woman. Owen protests but finally gives in, though it takes some begging and finally ordering on his part to get Cristina to agree to it. The surgery winds up turning even more complicated, and Cristina has the absolutely horrific task of assisting Teddy while acting like she's excited to do some fancy procedure. She manages to keep it together but the second they are finished, she tells April to close up the patient and pulls Teddy into the scrub room. There, she immediately tells her mentor what happened during Henry's surgery and informs her that he died. It's awful. AWFUL. Owen then finds Cristina, who looks pretty much like an empty husk of a person at this point, and when he finds out that she told Teddy, kind of freaks out and insists that was his job. Cristina cuts him off to tell him that it didn't matter who told her, that she doesn't want to hear all of these protests from Owen and that Teddy won't want to hear them either.

Fortunately, to save me from crawling into bed and never coming out again, one single good thing happens at the very end of the episode. And it's a pretty awesome good thing. Meredith and Derek are home, finally, and after 39 hours awake Mere is starving and barely able to stand so she orders pizza. When the doorbell rings she goes to answer it, and winds up just staring at whoever is there in shock. Derek hurries over to see what is wrong but what he sees is Janet, holding Zola, and she hands the baby over to the happy parents and tells them, "She's yours." It doesn't make up for the complete horror of the rest of the episode, but it's a good start.

Happy new year, my gorgeous readers! Are we ready to jump back in to the downer-fest that this show has become? Let's get right to it! Previously on Grey's Anatomy, a lot of bad shit happened. Henry died. Ushering in this episode is an arty shot of rolling, dark storm clouds, just in case you weren't sure of the tone. As we are treated to slow-motion, head-cracking scenes of Meredith and Alex's ambulance accident and Cristina's horror at learning that her dead patient is Henry, Meredith's VO explains that victims of sudden impact are the hardest to treat. That's because of everything that comes after the initial collision: being thrown around in an ambulance, your inner organs being tossed like a salad, etc. There's no way to know how much damage has been done until all that stops.

Back on the dark, wet and windy road, Alex runs over to try and help the people that have been thrown out of the van. Mere is kind of helpless as she is holding the intubated baby and keeping her breathing by squeezing the bag valve mask. One of the victims is a man calling for his wife, who isn't responding. A teenage girl, Lilly, climbs out of the wreckage, banged up but generally fine, and she starts to freak out when she can't wake up her mom. Meredith tries to calm her down and winds up handing her the baby and instructing her to count, "One, two," and then squeeze to keep her breathing. Lilly is freaked out at the idea but Mere tells her she has to do it so that Mere can go try to help her family. She instructs the girl to count out loud so that Mere knows she's still doing her job, and warns her not to stop no matter what happens.

As Teddy continues to work on Laura, her husband Griffith is getting more and more upset. Their son drew is sleeping to him and is smiling broadly in his sleep so that we can reflect on the sweet innocence of youth as contrasted with the absolute horror in this sweet child's mother having her heart ripped to shreds by a wayward screw, or something. Griffith is on the phone with Laura's mother and when he sees Jackson he finally puts him on to try and give her an adequate update on her daughter's surgery.

Bailey, Owen, and Richard are having a powwow about whether or not it's time to tell Teddy that her husband has died. Bailey finds it pretty heinous that they are waiting, but Richard points out that there really isn't a good way to handle the situation. Given how absolutely horrific it is already, he thinks that they should at least take the course of action that might save another patient's life and let Teddy finish up her surgery first. Rather lamely, Richard tells them both that Teddy will understand. Owen, who so far has just been heaving troubled sighs, asks if Richard really thinks so -- no one has an answer for that, it seems.

Alex and Mere have managed to line up their patients as near as they can to the side of the road. Fortunately, since the family was going camping, they had sleeping bags and blankets for the makeshift roadside ER. Lilly is still melting down at her mom's continued silence, but Mere just reminds her urgently to keep squeezing. Finally, she tells her to focus on the blinker of the van and to count to that, giving her something else to focus on than the broken bodies of her entire family.Alex oh-so-delicately yells out to Mere that he can see someone's brains on the ground, which I think means Grandma isn't going to make it to the hospital. He then checks out Lilly's little sister Abby, who has an almost comically large shard of glass sticking out of one eyeball. I say "almost" because IT'S A GIANT SHARD OF GLASS IN HER EYEBALL. It's at this moment that I started sending urgent text messages to my friend with an eye-injury phobia expressly forbidding her to turn on this particular hour of television.

Lilly's dad Robert is conscious enough to ask about his kids and in doing so, they realize that there is a third child that is not yet accounted for. Meredith runs over to the crash site and finds the kid, Michael, rather obviously pinned under a door. Seriously, neither of them did a quick lap and just assumed the bodies that were strewn about were conveniently it? At least they have found him now, I guess. He's wild-eyed with shock and though Mere assures him that she's going to help him, she can't seem to free his legs.

It's at this moment that they hear the screech of tires and notice headlights in the trees. Alex screams at Mere to get out of the road, Lilly screams for her brother, and finally Meredith shows us that her suicidal streak isn't completely gone and she walks into the middle of the road with her hands up, hoping that she can stop the vehicle from running them all over and adding to the mess. When the truck rounds the curve, though, it turns out to be an emergency vehicle there to help them and Mere breathes with relief that she didn't get pancaked after all.

Once they arrive at the hospital, Alex runs the baby to the NICU to take care of her. Derek finds Meredith and frets about her needing some stitches in her forehead, but she tells him she'll be fine and sticks a Band-Aid on it for the time being. Bailey takes the little brother, Michael, while Callie and Richard take Robert, and Callie calls out to Owen to come help them. Lilly was given a bed but she gets up and is horrified to see doctors doing compressions on her mom in one of the trauma rooms. Mere sees this and immediately steers her back toward her bed.

April runs in and tells Owen she is there to help, which throws him completely off since she had been working with Teddy. He tries to send April back but she tells him that she was hoping to get some more trauma hours. Realizing she's not going to be put off, Owen tells her quietly that Henry is dead and Teddy still doesn't know. Kudos to Sarah Drew whose face crumbles as she tries to absorb what is going on. He wants her to go back to work with Teddy and she gamely agrees, even though she has started to cry. He realizes that's too much to ask and that she can't go back in this state, so he tells her to go instead to the gallery and just watch the surgery as it continues.

Up in the NICU, Alex is rather manically telling Arizona all about the baby and what she needs, as he works like a fiend. She calmly tells him that he should slow down, and then tells him that he did an amazing job in the field and she'll take it from here since he needs to get himself examined. He protests but she cuts him off, and finally he leaves, angrily ripping off his fetching pink gown.

Owen joins Callie and Richard with Robert, whose pelvis has pretty much been reduced to mush. He struggles to speak but can't stop beating himself up for what happened; he cries that Lilly didn't want to come and instead wanted to spend her birthday with friends. Birthday, you ask? Oh yes, just pocket that for later. As he cries about forcing her to spend time with her family, Owen tries to assure him that none of this is his fault. Callie then apologizes in advance for what she is about to do, and uses a sheet around his waist to somehow pull something into place. His howls of pain seem to finally distract him from his guilt. Teddy then pages Owen 911, so he runs off, terrified about what this could mean.

But for right now, it doesn't mean, "My husband is dead and you didn't tell me, so I'm going to kill you." Instead, she tells Owen that something more has gone wrong with Laura's heart and so she needs to do more work and she wants Cristina there to help her. She's ticked off that Cristina hasn't answered any pages, and Owen tries to tell her it's because his wife is tired. But because she has no idea what's really going on, these excuses sound ridiculously lame -- since when does Cristina pass up heart surgery because she's tired? Come on, Owen. You need to invent something better than that. Unfortunately, Cristina is the type of surgeon who would take part in a cardio surgery for just about any reason other than having just had her boss' husband die on her operating table, so Teddy just tells Owen to get her there. She admits that she needs another "me" in the OR but warns Owen not to tell Cristina she said that.

By Lauren S

Derek and Mark are charged with getting the glass out of Abby's eye, and they have Lexie calling around to try and find a retinal surgeon but she can't find anyone who is available immediately. It's super convenient, then, that Mark's new girlfriend is just that, and she happens to be at his apartment, five minutes away. Lexie's very obviously not happy about any of that and Derek is awfully skeptical of letting Mark's new plaything operate with them, but Mark gives her a call anyway.

Little brother Michael is in an awful lot of pain, but it's not his crushed legs -- it seems to be his liver. He starts to freak out when he hears his sister yelling and freaking out, so Mere, who was helping out and knows that Lilly already watched her grandmother die, goes over to tend to her. She's once again watching them do compressions on her mom, and when Meredith walks in they basically tell her that she's gone. Meredith gets it but wants to try one more time for Lilly's sake and does; unfortunately, it's clear that Mom really is truly gone. Finally, she calls time of death while Lilly goes quiet and stares numbly at her mother's body.

Alex seems to have pure adrenaline coursing through his veins, given the amount of twitching and drumming he does while trying to just sit in the hallway. Finally he gets up and stalks off, and Arizona finds him in a gown, about to do a procedure on the baby. She demands to know what on earth he is doing, but he yells back that he's been through hell with this baby and didn't do that to just hand off her case now. Arizona agrees -- I suspect it's as much because he's acting like such a twitchy lunatic as it is that she thinks he has a good point -- and tells him calmly that he needs to slow down. He claims to know this, but his hands are almost shaking as he works frantically on the baby.

Derek and Mark are discussing Julia, with Derek still skeptical about bringing her in, given that Mark has no idea really what her trauma skills are like other than stories she has told him. He warns Mark that if he thinks she is in over her head, he's kicking her out. Mark just retorts that Derek obviously thinks anyone he sleeps with can't be smart and talented. Derek admits this is mostly true, so Mark pulls out his trump card and points out that Addie slept with him, and she's brilliant. They could also mention that Lexie is no slouch either, but her name isn't mentioned.

She is actually already in a room with Julia, Mark's current flame, looking at scans of Abby's eye when the boys join them. Lexie sheepishly apologizes once again for hitting her with a softball, and she assures Lex that it's fine, and her breast made a quick recovery. Mark giggles and confirms this, which doesn't really help Lexie's mood at all. They look at the scans and Derek figures that Abby will lose her eye, but Julia has some brilliant method to try that might help them save it. Derek points out some possible issues but Julia has answers, which seems to finally impress him and he agrees that they should try to save it.

Lilly, her tennis shoes soaked in blood, is joined by Meredith who tells her how sorry she is about her mom. She then lets the girl know that her dad and sister are in surgery, and they are taking her brother up now. Gently, Mere then asks if she knows if any of them were taking any medications or had any allergies but Lilly doesn't really know. Gently, and almost cringing at herself, Meredith then asks if they ever happened to discuss if her parents wanted extraordinary measures taken to save their lives. Lilly is appalled at the thought and cries that no, they just talked about "normal stuff." Mere wants to do what she can and find someone that Lilly might be able to lean on, so she asks who takes care of the kids when their parents are gone; is that someone they can call? Glumly, Lilly points out that this was her grandmother, whose brains we know are out on a windy road nearby. She breaks down, and Mere helplessly rubs her back and lets her cry.

Now, my friends, we shall have another recap-by-sound, as I cannot even take the close-ups they are showing of eye surgery. Yes, I know they are fake. Yes, it still made me almost throw up in my hand. So here you go: Music plays, and I assume they are working away. Derek gets annoyed when he thinks that Julia pushed the glass in further and wants to take over, but she testily points out that her hand is currently in the girl's eye. She then gets something right and tells them this is the fun part; juicy squishing sounds lead me to believe she then pulls the glass out.

Since he's not bribing the scheduling folks with lattes, Ben is on Bailey and Meredith's surgery. Making conversation, he tells Bailey that he heard she lost a patient and starts to say he was sorry, but Bailey cuts him off to inform him that it wasn't the trial that killed him, it was another medical condition. He defends that he wasn't implying that in the least but she has no interest and tells him to focus on their current patient. He then administers one of his anesthesia drugs, and in response Michael's vital signs go crazy and he starts to burn up. Ben has a realization and yells to a nurse to get ice; Bailey is ticked off that he seems to be trying to take control of her OR, but he rightfully ignores her and shouts instructions. As he does so, Bailey finally realizes what is going on and that the kid has malignant hyperthermia, which Dr. Google tells me is some sort of reaction to certain anesthesia drugs. And yes, I looked that up because by this point, with all of the things going wrong, I felt like this had to be a fake disease. (Also, I thought they said "hypothermia.") But no, it's an actual thing.

Cristina stares into the OR for a few moments and bends over like she might puke, trying to compose herself. Finally, she goes in and Teddy explains that they had to put Laura back on bypass so that they can fix whatever is now wrong with her heart. Before Cristina can leave to scrub, Teddy adds a very sincere and happy thank you for doing Henry's surgery, and she apologizes for having to lie to her and not tell her who she was operating on. Cristina draws on some crazy inner strength -- as well as the aid of a mask she is holding to her face -- to keep her voice normal as she tells Teddy that she's not mad that they did that. Teddy is too busy to notice that she sounds a little bit like a zombie, and tells her to go scrub in.

Owen goes back to Callie's surgery, and when she hears that he just sent Cristina in to work with Teddy, her response is appropriately appalled. Unfortunately, she goes one step too far in her questioning Owen's judgment when she asks how he thought it was a good idea to have both of them together working on her patient. Owen icily points out that it was her mistake that put all of them in this situation in the first place, so she's not really the one to talk. ...Yeah, this really does kind of suck for both of them.

As Cristina and Teddy work away, Teddy notices April up in the gallery and asks what she is doing there, since there's some sort of big all-hands-on-deck trauma going on. When Cristina says she doesn't know, Teddy's mind wanders back to Henry and she asks Cristina if she had a chance to check on him before she scrubbed in. Backed in to a corner, Cristina quickly decides to use April to make her way out and she tells Teddy that she bets no one wanted to work with her. She mocks April's voice and does a pretty cuttingly spot-on imitation, and Teddy can't help but laugh while April watches and listens from above. It's obviously hurtful, but she's smart enough to know why Cristina is doing it, and when Jackson comes in to check on her and offers to turn off the intercom, April stops him. Sadly, she tells him she needs to know everything that is going on, and tells him she can handle it. The furrows in his brow say that he's not so sure she can, but he goes along with it.

By Lauren S

Down in the OR there are still all sorts of complications and problems. Teddy takes a moment to think up a solution. What she comes up with is to do an ex vivo procedure, which means taking out the heart and putting it on ice while they work on it, hooking Laura up to machines that will fill in while the heart is taking its little break, and then putting her all back together when they are done. Cristina can't believe this, but Teddy can't believe that Cristina isn't excited about the idea of this surgery, and points out that this should be on her bucket list if it isn't already. Cristina has no choice; she has to suck it up that now this surgery is going to go even longer. When Teddy excitedly asks if she is up for it, she weakly agrees. Teddy then wants to put on some music, and happily tells Cristina it's her choice. I bet Cristina could put together a good mixtape right now of songs with the general theme: "Anywhere but here."

Michael is starting to stabilize, but there's still some waiting around and Bailey grudgingly compliments him, saying that this condition is usually caught too late, but he saved the boy's life. She won't really look at him as she speaks, but he is all smiley and flirty like normal as he tells her that he didn't want another patient dying on her. She gets defensive and annoyed as she counters that he did this just for her, and he jokingly points out that yes, if it was a different surgeon, he would have just not said anything. She's totally busted, there, for trying to make this all about her. He keeps teasing her about various things and she finally gets back to the surgery, still miffed. It's a relief to see Jason George once again be cute and smooth -- I caught up on some recent episodes of The Closer, where he played a gang kingpin, and he was super duper evil, sinister suave there. It's kind of amazing what a fine line there is between the two. Give me joking, flirting Ben any day.

Arizona is putting the baby back in her incubator when Alex runs in, frenzied, yelling that they have to go back to the OR because he forgot to do something or other. When she doesn't react he starts to holler at her and she finally forces him to look her in the eye and then reminds him calmly that he totally already did whatever it was. She then orders him to sit down and he seems to finally realize that he has to obey. She tells him he's overtired and likely in shock, and now he has to take a break for real. He tries to protest again but she shuts him up right quick.

Back in Teddy and Cristina's Funtime OR, Cristina works on the heart as it sits on ice while music blares. Teddy compliments her work and the two are about to get ready to put it back in to Laura's body. First, though, Teddy thinks they need waking up and she tells Cristina that when she was in med school she and her classmates had a funny trick to wake themselves up. Cristina blandly replies that she's already awake, but as she picks up the heart, Teddy lets out a crazy, "Wooooooh!" Is it best to startle your resident into wakefulness when she's holding a living organ? I kind of think not, but maybe that's why they need some waking up.

Teddy wants Cristina to join in the wooh-ing, but Cristina can only muster a really half-hearted wooh of her own. Finally, after a lot more yelps from Teddy, Cristina manages to get mildly into it; at that moment, Owen walks in to the gallery and sees what he thinks is surely a display of insanity down below as his surgeons whoop it up. He asks April what they are doing and she says slowly that she thinks they are having fun. Cristina looks up at them then, though, and the desperation on her face reminds us that she's in fact having anything but while Teddy boogies down beside her.

Robert is out of surgery but still unconscious, and Lilly is sitting to his bed, begging him to be okay, apologizing for being a jerk, and promising to do all sorts of things like help her younger siblings with their homework and babysit if he would just wake up. Given how well things have gone for this family tonight, I can't help but think that Lilly is just going to have her world shattered further. Meredith sees her and goes in to update her that her siblings at least are out of surgery and doing okay. Lilly makes Mere promise that no one else will break the news to them about their mom, since she is the one who should do it. Mere agrees, and then as if on cue Robert takes this moment to flatline. Mere and the nurses pull out the paddles and try to resuscitate him as Lilly looks on in horror.

Jackson goes to find Griffith in the OR to give him another update on Laura, and reports that they had to take her heart out to repair it, but that it all went smoothly and they're about to put her back together and finish up. My guess is that he is personally relieved, which is why he doesn't seem to take the emotional temperature of the room as he smiles and tells Griffith this is a good thing. Griffith flips out on him, yelling that his wife is in pieces on the table, and what is wrong with Jackson to say this is a good thing? Jackson is spared further wrath because Drew wakes up, and Griffith holds him and tells him gently to go back to sleep. He then gives Jackson a death glare until he walks away.

Meredith finally gets her stitches... from Alex. I guess he's been able to calm down enough to seem capable with a needle and thread. She's really happy to hear that the baby is doing well, but when he asks about the other kids, she sadly reports that after watching her mom die, Lilly won't leave her dad's side and he keeps coding. On cue, it happens again. Lilly wails a plea to her father to live while Mere tries to tell her to leave the room, and finally a nurse tries to pull her away as Lilly starts to scream that she has a right to be there. Richard comes in to help, and Mere just focuses her energy on trying to bring Robert back from the dead yet again.

I must have caught a glimpse of the beginning of the scene, because my notes say, "Sutures on eye sweet Jesus." Mercifully, though, I can't remember this so I think my brain kicked in to survival mode and blotted the visual out. Julia is done with her part of the surgery and leaves the boys to finish up while she talks to Lexie out in the hall. Lexie is terrified to have to talk to her alone but Julia assures her that it's just for post-op instructions. She tells Lexie that the eye has to be covered 24/7 and while Abby can watch TV, she can't read a book for three days. Really not so bad considering the shard seemed to be about the length of a finger.

By Lauren S

I'll give you a moment to get some fresh, dry tissues, because you're going to need them. Teddy is finally done with Laura's surgery, and she cheerfully asks Cristina if she wants to close. Cristina tells her that April will take care of it, and calls up to her in the gallery. April is caught kind of unawares, but immediately agrees to do it and runs downstairs. Teddy is incredibly confused, especially when Cristina asks to speak to her privately.

The two go to the scrub room, where Teddy immediately asks Cristina if she is okay. Cristina turns to face her and starts to tell her about Henry's surgery, in a very professional manner: they thought they could do the surgery with the laser, but then they had to open him up. Teddy is really confused because Owen hadn't even told her that, but the penny still hasn't dropped just yet. Cristina then tells her about the tumor that had eroded Henry's pulmonary artery, and that she and Richard used extraordinary measures... it's at this moment that Teddy realizes what is happening, and tries to go into denial. Cristina just tells her that his heart couldn't tolerate it, and he did not survive the surgery, and she's sorry. Teddy gapes at her, not yet fully able to grasp how quickly her world is being torn apart. She asks, "You're saying... he's dead?" Cristina tells her yes, but Teddy then orders her to say it. She explains what I actually didn't know, but which makes perfect sense: the first thing doctors are taught when informing the family is that they have to say the words so that there is no doubt. She admits she never really understood why until this moment. She starts to cry, and tells Cristina that she needs her to say it. Calmly, with tears in her eyes, Cristina tells her, "Henry is dead." Teddy sucks in her breath, manages to thank Cristina, and then opens the door to leave but for a moment holds on to it like it's a lifeline. She then leaves, and Cristina's own tears finally spill down her own cheeks as she drops her face into her hands.

Morning arrives, as we can tell by the beautiful sunrise over Seattle and the sound of birds chirping. They'll quit that cheerful nonsense soon enough once they watch this episode. Owen finds Cristina sitting in the locker room and, realizing they are out of surgery, asks, panicky, where Teddy is. When Cristina tells him she doesn't know he realizes what happened and seems stunned that Cristina told her. Cristina snaps out of her daze and angrily tells him of course she did; when he tries to protest that it was his job to do it she cuts him off to angrily remind him that this isn't actually about him at all. She reminds him that she told Teddy because he forced her to go and work with her, talking, joking and basically lying, for hours. Owen starts to apologize but Cristina has no interest in hearing it and after a moment, adds that Teddy isn't going to want to hear it either. Owen, good and crushed, leaves.

Teddy walks in to a room where a nurse is making notes in Henry's chart, to his sheet-covered body. Teddy yells at her to hand over the chart and get out, and then hugs the binder to her like maybe it will protect her from reality as she stares at the form on the table. A good sad song starts up as she walks over and sits down. She puts the chart down, and then takes off her cap and smoothes it neatly on top, buying time before she makes this completely real. She sits a moment and then screws up her courage and pulls back the sheet to reveal his gray face. She drops her head and then looks up at him and rests her chin in her hands so she can gaze at him sadly. After a couple of false starts she tentatively reaches for his face and strokes his hair before she breaks down completely in sobs.

Lilly, meanwhile, signs the DNR papers for her father as the nurses start to unhook him from life support. She asks Mere what will happen and Meredith explains the steps, which will start with a particular alarm. The alarm starts to ring and Mere quickly turns off the sound, and Lilly asks her if this is it. Mere tells her that it is, and that she'll be right outside if Lilly needs her. But Lilly asks her to stay, and so Meredith holds her hand while Lilly leans in to her and starts to cry. Mere stares at the ceiling, shaking her head, and seems to be wondering why all this happens. I find I'm doing the same thing, but presumably for different reasons.

Callie gears herself up to go face Griffith's wrath about what happened to his wife, but Jackson runs alongside her and tells her he should take this fall, she agrees, and so he plans to go out there, but Callie stops him and explains what's what. As much as she'd like him to be the one to deal with it, she's his attending, and he's a fifth year, which means he gets a free ride in this situation because he is young and still learning. She's not happy about it but hopes that he will learn a lesson from this, and that includes checking his own resident's work more closely once he is an attending so that he doesn't find himself in a mess like this down the road, having to talk to a family who, as she puts it, hates her almost as much as she currently hates herself. She then braces herself and goes out, and immediately is accosted by an angry Griffith demanding answers. Jackson can only watch, wrinkling his pretty face in despair.

Bailey is sitting in the empty cafeteria, drinking a coffee and decompressing, while Ben sits two tables away having his own coffee and doing a crossword. She still won't look at him but admits that she was rude when he mentioned Henry. Ben isn't troubled -- he tells her it's kind of her "thing" to lash out and want space when bad things happen. That is, in fact, why he is sitting so far away. She explains that she lost a friend as well as a patient, and he genuinely tells her he's sorry. They sit another moment and slowly, she admits that she wouldn't mind if he didn't give her quite so much space. He gets up and she manages to glance at him as he sits down at the table with his crossword. He then reaches over and puts one hand on hers, like he's slowly reaching out to a scared animal. He gives her a smile and gets back to work on his crossword while she gives him a hint of a smile of her own.

Derek is finally convinced that Julia is rather a smart cookie, despite her taste in men, and he warns Mark not to screw this one up since she's a keeper. Lexie of course overhears this and sighs. Dude, even the "lighthearted" storylines are sad this week.

Lilly has gone to Michael's room and Abby is there, with one eye all bandaged up. Meredith tells Lilly she'll be outside if she needs her and then closes the door so that Lilly can tell them that both of their parents are now dead.

Mere VOs that you can't prepare for a sudden impact since it comes out of nowhere, and the life you knew is then over forever. To illustrate, we see Teddy crying over Henry's body.

Later, Meredith is at home, almost asleep in the kitchen when Derek walks in and rummages around for food. Mere tells him that she ordered a pizza, and then has him come over and keep her company while they wait for it to arrive. They smile and flirt, and after gazing at her lovingly for a while he tells her that they will be okay with just the two of them, which he knows is what she wants. Mere replies happily that she loves him. The doorbell rings, and she jumps up to go grab their pizza breakfast.

But instead of hearing the door opening, Derek hears only silence and he looks up to see Mere, staring at the door as if she has just seen a ghost. She says his name and he walks over as she asks him, "Isn't that our baby?" and points to the door. There, on the other side, is Janet, holding Zola, The Cutest Baby In The History Of Television. Derek replies that it is and immediately pulls open the door; Janet smiles and tells them, "She's yours." As Derek picks Zola up, Meredith beams and does a happily little wriggle of glee before taking Zola into her own arms. Derek then reaches over and pulls both of his girls in for a giant family bear hug. And it's awesome, and yes, I cried AGAIN, and thank goodness these were happy tears. But it wasn't enough to make up for the just ridiculous levels of tragedy and abject grief that we were subjected to this hour (and, really, much of this season).

Please, PLEASE, let's try having the show be fun, and occasionally have people be happy for more than just 30 seconds at a time. Let's make the second half of Season 10 the half that doesn't make me want to crawl into bed, never to emerge again.

p>Lauren S is a writer and gal-about-town who lives and works in Atlanta. This show is causing her to amass a large collection of various eye de-puffing creams. She wants everyone to know: "The views expressed in my recaps and anything else I might write on TWoP are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer."

By Lauren S

Mere VOs that you can't prepare for a sudden impact since it comes out of nowhere, and the life you knew is then over forever. To illustrate, we see Teddy crying over Henry's body.