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'Grey's Anatomy' recap: Meredith wakes up

By Megan Armstrong | Last updated 4/23/21

"Dying is exhausting," said Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey), or the posthumous spirit of him now occupying a beach between life and death, and exhausted is exactly how I feel after watching Thursday night's Grey's Anatomy ("Good as Hell").

Early in the episode, Teddy (Kim Raver) and Webber (James Pickens Jr.) are still befuddled by Meredith's (Ellen Pompeo) COVID-19 case. The titular character's vitals are stable, her X-rays look great and her oxygen requirements have gone down.

"Which is why she should be awake for more than two minutes at a time," Webber says while looking down at an unconscious Meredith. "Why isn't she? What is it?"

Well, newly hired and engaged Winston (Anthony Hill) points out her liver enzymes are out of whack.

"We're seeing more and more patients in this same position," Webber continues. "Seems like they're finally out of the woods and then some new problem arises, and they just, they just crash. We can't let this happen to Meredith."

While the physical Meredith seems to be hanging on by a thread, her subconscious being is happily sitting on her sunny beach with her beloved, long-lost love Derek. She asks if he was in pain during his Season 11 death, when doctors sealed his fate by failing to do a head CT that would have revealed his severe brain injuries suffered from the car crash. (This episode was emotionally exhausting, as mentioned above, but that episode was so incredibly frustrating.)

"The worst part was knowing they were getting it wrong," the Doctor Formerly Known as McDreamy says. "I didn't want to leave you, but I knew at a certain point."

Meredith tells him she came to the hospital after he had already been declared brain dead, but he already knows that. He couldn't hear her, but he knew. And that's when he says, "Dying is exhausting."

He continues: "You know that point as a surgeon, you've done everything for your patient. I could try to will them to fight, will them to live, but I never understood the level of exhaustion. There comes a point where the desire to rest overrides the desire to live."

Meredith grins, knowingly. Uh-oh.

By the way, this is all before the FIRST COMMERCIAL BREAK!

Elsewhere in and around Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Jo (Camilla Luddington) begs Bailey (Chandra Wilson) to let her change specialties from general surgery to OBGYN. (Bailey eventually caves.) Link (Chris Carmack) and Amelia (Caterina Scorsone) are in a lover's quarrel over a patient. (Amelia finds a tumor then saves the day.) Winston tells a still-unconscious Meredith that he has proposed to Maggie (Kelly McCreary) before running more tests on her.

Back to the beach: Meredith wants to get closer to Derek. He tells her she's worried about leaving the kids, and that she's even more scared that if she gets closer to him, she'll never leave. She tries to rationalize that "kids survive, and struggle makes them stronger." Derek has a different argument: "People love you; people need you." But Meredith seems to have a rebuttal for everything these days. "I'm tired," she says.

Teddy and Winston later get Meredith's tests results back, and they show clotting in her liver to explain why she can't stay awake. Winston defers to Teddy to perform the necessary surgery, and while she says it's a simple procedure, Webber isn't entirely convinced that she's up for it after her recent mental breakdown.

Teddy starts Meredith's surgery despite her nerves—segueing back to the beach, where Derek and Meredith are adorably reminiscing on their famous Post-It note marriage and subsequently magically get dressed in wedding attire—finally getting the proper wedding they never had. Derek makes Meredith promise "to torture yourself less," and as they inch closer, Meredith admits she doesn't want to leave their three kids.

In real life, Zola (Aniela Gumbs), their eldest daughter, is "mad at everything" and asks why her mom isn't home yet. Maggie and Zola scream it out.

After Meredith's surgery, Teddy is panicking because she hasn't woken up. She tries to kiss Owen (Kevin McKidd), but he stops her and tells her to feel the pain rather than continue her pattern of running from it. Winston has an idea: he wants Maggie to bring Zola to the hospital, but Maggie is not having it but Zola overhears the conversation and says she wants to see her mom.

Zola runs to Meredith's bedside. "Mommy!" she says. "It's me! I'm here! It's ZoZo! I miss you so much." My heart explodes, but Winston's psychological component to healing doesn't work. Meredith's condition remains unchanged.

"It's not time yet," Derek says at the beach, standing very closely behind Meredith.

"There's no pain here," she says, another freaking rebuttal.

"You wanna know a secret?" he says, hugging her. "I even miss the pain. You have to go."

"I'm so tired," she says, another freaking rebuttal.

"It's not your time yet," he urges. "Our kids need you. You have to go."

And as soon as he says that, Meredith begins to hear Zola, wakes up, responds and smiles. Derek walks away, now alone on the beach.

Now everybody, including me, is crying.

Oh! All of this happens (and more, but who has the room? Who can type that fast?) only for the preview to show us Jackson (Jesse Williams), who ended last week's episode by speeding off to an unknown destination, turning up at none other than April Kepner's (Sarah Drew) door! A flashback commences of their years-long tumultuous love story that resulted in one daughter and one terrible divorce before April left the show after the Season 14 finale in 2018.