Spoiler alert: Do not read if you haven’t watched the December 10 episode of “Grey’s Anatomy”.
“Grey’s Anatomy” is continuing to spread awareness and shed light on the coronavirus pandemic.
Thursday’s emotional episode saw Miranda Bailey’s (Chandra Wilson) mom lose her battle to the deadly virus after contracting it in the nursing home she recently moved into.
“She’s decompensating, she barely knows who I am and I want to be there for her,” Bailey told Richard Webber, according to People. “I want her husband to be there for her. She deserves to be surrounded by love and family. But Dad’s in quarantine. He’s high risk. I don’t want him to expose anyone and I don’t want him to be exposed.”
“I know this is not what you imagined for your mother and I’m sorry about that,” Webber told her. “She needs you now. It’s time. If you don’t go in, I promise you will never forgive yourself.”
Bailey named a handful of patients’ names, particularly people of colour, who had been impacted by the virus in some way or another at the end of the heart-wrenching episode.
Hundreds of names were then listed on the screen.
“Patients lose their power when they’re referred to as ‘Bed No. 4’ or ‘Arm pain guy,'” Bailey said in the powerful voiceover as she sat next to her mother as she passed away.
“Even in their deaths, they are not faceless. They are not nameless. They are more than statistics, more than co-morbid conditions or nursing home patients. They are sons, brothers, and uncles who speak five languages and run restaurants: Wade Klein, 66. They are great grandfathers who love Broadway: Jacob Lappin, 92. They are baseball-loving nurses with an easy laugh: Dane Wilson, 45. They are the world’s greatest mothers and they are the most beloved wives: Elena Rose Bailey, 84.”
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“The inspiration for saying the names in the final voiceover was multifactorial,” Zoanne Clack, the writer of Thursday’s episode, said in a statement. “When my mom contracted and almost died of COVID, I was so mad that she might go down in history as one of the nameless, faceless ramifications of this disease. I was seeing how it was disproportionately affecting Black Americans, older Americans, and people who lived in assisted living. My mom was all of those. But she was also a teacher who has influenced many successful lives and she has an infectious laugh. That was the story I wanted people to remember, not that she was a victim of a pandemic.”
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“Fortunately after a long and hard-fought seven-week battle, she is now a COVID survivor,” Clack continued. “So she doesn’t have to be one among many. But there are so many who are among the many and who deserve to be more than numbers or statistics.”
Wilson told Variety of whether coronavirus will be at the centre of the rest of the season, “Well, I know that we were starting in the COVID environment — we were just going to jump in time a bit to get us into the pandemic, and then we were going to flash back into things that may have been missed at the end of season 16 [since production was shut down]. In my heart, just as Chandra Wilson, I was hoping by the time these episodes aired, we would be talking about the past. But we are so present right now, in sort of a frightening way. So that’s been really unexpected for me.”
The actress added of why it was important to include a storyline about coronavirus in nursing homes this season, “There is a myriad of material out there right now, as far as how people are affected differently. Specifically in Washington, at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a big light shone on nursing homes being affected in a large way, so it just made sense for ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, since Washington is our home, that we would highlight nursing homes. Bringing Bailey’s parents to Seattle and having them live in an assisted living facility was one way to do that.”
