With the Season 14 finale signaling the exit of Dr. April Kepner (Sarah Drew) and Dr. Arizona Robbins (Jessica Capshaw) after years on the show, we’re prepping ourselves to say goodbye to the fan favorite characters. Here’s a look back at the hardest goodbyes from the series.
Denny Duquette
Long before he was bashing people’s heads in with a barbed-wire covered bat named Lucille on “The Walking Dead,” Jeffrey Dean Morgan played the impossibly romantic — and dying — Denny Duquette on “Grey’s Anatomy.” Denny’s charm won over viewers, and Izzy Stevens (Katherine Heigl), and when he eventually died it was heartbreaking.
George O’Malley
George (T. R. Knight) was the sweetest intern, even if he was a little bumbling at times. He was always there for his fellow doctors, even when they spent plenty of time teasing him. He even died in sacrifice by saving a woman from getting hit by a bus, only to be hit himself. RIP George.
Lexie Grey
Meredith’s half-little sister Lexie (Chyler Leigh) was a little annoying to be honest when she first appeared in Season 3. But it didn’t take long for her to win our hearts, and when she died the infamous plane crash episode we were just as devastated as Mark.
Mark Sloan
Mark initially survives the plane crash, but returns to the hospital in bad condition — so bad, in fact, that he’s on life support. The rest of the doctors have to deal with the fact that he specifies in his will that after 30 days, he is to be taken off life support.
Cristina Yang
Saying goodbye to Meredith’s person felt just as painful as saying goodbye to our own person after 10 years of watching the best friends. In the Season 10 finale, Cristina (Sandra Oh) leaves the hospital for good to go work in Zurich. Our one consoling fact is that Cristina wasn’t killed off.
Derek Shepherd
After everything that Mer and Derek (Patrick Dempsey) have been through together, watching the machines keeping Derek alive turned off one by one with a super-sad rendition of “Chasing Cars” playing in the background — oh, not to mention the flashback of their relationship — broke us. It didn’t break Mer, though. “It’s okay,” she tells him. “You go. We’ll be fine.”