The Most Abused Woman on Television

A dozen seasons in, why is Meredith Grey still being tortured?

By MELISSA RAYWORTH

DR. MEREDITH GREY was brutally beaten last week. Broken leg, broken arm, broken ribs. One lung collapsed, and her head was smashed so hard against walls and windows that her jaw was dislocated. She lost her hearing. Her face was a mosaic of swollen purple bruises. Her throat was so damaged that she couldn’t even speak to call for help.

A co-worker eventually found the terrified pile of broken bones that was Meredith. But being saved brought more suffering: A team of doctors — including her closest friends and relatives — had to smash her jaw back into place and force tubes under her skin in their race to save her life. No time for painkillers. No time for anything but pain.

This, sick as it sounds, was just another day at the office for Meredith Grey.

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IF YOU’VE followed the ABC-TV series “Grey’s Anatomy” during its 11-year run, you’ve spent hours watching Meredith suffer and bleed.

She was trapped once with her hands inside a body with a bomb in it. Surviving the bomb came at the price of watching a first-responder explode in a rain of bloody pink mist right in front of her. She was in a plane crash. Her sister died in that plane crash. Her close friend George got killed by a speeding bus. Her close friend Alex got shot. Her husband got shot, too, and nearly died. Then he lived through the aforementioned plane crash, only to die in a horrific car crash after saving people from a different car crash.

Her angry, depressed mother once made young Meredith watch her bloody suicide attempt, and years later Mom tortured grown-up Meredith with a slow trickle of cruel, dementia-fueled insults. Disasters of every stripe have tortured Meredith, too, including but not limited to fires, a ferry boat crash that left her drowned (and briefly dead, or so it seemed) and a violent storm during which she had to help deliver her own baby by C-section and then help save herself from bleeding to death. In the dark, because the storm knocked the power out.

This list doesn’t scratch the surface, really. Did I mention the miscarriage caused by the stress from the crazed gunman who shot her husband? There’s more, and that’s the point:

Shonda Rhimes and her writing team have put the fictional Meredith Grey through more pain and abuse than any human could possibly withstand and still be functioning.

What I want to know is, WHY?

Why should any woman — on television or anywhere else — suffer this often and this graphically? Why do the writers who play God in Meredith’s life choose to smite her again and again and again? Why does she have to lose so many of the people she loves, and so violently? And what should the women who have stood by Meredith — and by her creator, Shonda Rhimes — for more than a decade take away from all this brutality?

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I AM one of the women who stayed, even as the show’s red-hot popularity cooled. I admire the empire Rhimes has built, and applaud her powerful, sexy, female characters who fight for what they want and need. But having paid my taxes to dwell in Shondaland by giving my time all these years, I want to know: As Season 12 of “Grey’s Anatomy” (originally announced as the show’s final season) progresses, what exactly am I meant to learn from Meredith’s repeated, brutal abuse?

Is the point that our lives will always hurt, no matter what? And even brains, inner strength and consistent hard work cannot protect us from constant horror? Is Rhimes telling us that no matter how deeply we look inside ourselves for answers and how many times we choose to dance it out instead of crying, we’re still going to end up bruised and broken again and again?

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I WAS SURE, for a time, that “Grey’s” was revolutionary. Many shows explore the intersection where career and motherhood collide. But “Grey’s” added one more key element to the mix: Yes, Meredith battled for professional success and struggled to become a mother. But she also fought to build and sustain a truly passionate romance. The lame jokes that plague so many television scripts — the ones about how sex totally stops when you get married, but married couples don’t care anyway because they’re so sick of each other — had no place on this show. Every forty-something woman and man working at Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital claims frequent, hot sex as a basic human right, season after season. Having It All included not just high-profile work and domestic bliss, but enduring steamy passion, too.

And so, as Rhimes and her writers charted the paths of these characters, I waited for the payoff: How DOES a person balance work and sex and parenthood? What will these privileged, brilliant, beautiful people figure out about adult life that the rest of us can learn from?

I once believed that Meredith — along with her audience — was getting close to figuring it all out. It seemed clear that the title, while riffing off a classic medical textbook, was about Meredith’s own body and soul. It was the patient she was most invested in healing, and at times it seemed she really could.

But increasingly we’ve seen that each time she gets a moment to make sense of life and heal a bit from all that’s come before, she gets metaphorically and even literally punched in the head yet again. Another bone broken. Another split lip. More and more scar tissue layered between her and the world.

“Maybe we like the pain,” Meredith Grey once said. “Maybe we’re wired that way. Because without it, I don’t know; maybe we just wouldn’t feel real. What’s that saying? Why do I keep hitting myself with a hammer? Because it feels so good when I stop.”

The trouble is, when you’re busy pressing the button to funnel more morphine into your veins, deep thought is no longer an option. Each time Meredith pushed that button last Thursday, I wondered whether the message is that the epiphany won’t ever come. For Meredith, or for any woman.

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Still hungry? Further reading:

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Melissa Rayworth is a freelance writer with 15 years experience exploring the building blocks of modern life, including parenting/marriage, the myths and realities of modern suburbia, work/life balance, home design and pop culture/entertainment. She writes frequently for The Associated Press, WhatToExpect.com and TakePart.com, and has written for numerous clients including Salon.com and Babble.com. Melissa served for three years as managing editor of Military Spouse, the monthly magazine for America’s 1.1 million military families. She has contributed to several anthologies, including the SmartPop book series. Melissa currently splits her time between Bangkok, Pittsburgh and New York. Her latest project can be found at Sharpen Your Edge, and she tweets at @mrayworth.

©2016, Melissa Rayworth