Dr. Derek Shepherd

Dr.Derek Shepherd (also very commonly referred to as “Dr.McDreamy”) is a fictional character on the hit television series Grey's Anatomy. He was one of the main characters on the series, and served for nearly eleven seasons until his untimely death. Dr.Shepherd has consistently been a highly rated, fan-favorite character with many appreciable complexities (according to critics and everyday people alike), and his death shook the Grey's Anatomy community greatly.

This is displayed on social media, for instance. On the airing of the episode of Dr.Shepherd’s death, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media outlets blew up with statuses of disbelief on what had happened, hashtags in memoriam of Dr.Shepherd, and anger/annoyance messages to the show’s director, Shonda Rhimes. Examples of this are shown below:

To an extent, these displays of grief can be normalized and applicable to grief of real-life people or real-world tragedies. Many people, for instance, find that disbelief is a common reaction to grief-- not imagining losing someone so close to them so soon or so suddenly. This is definitely the case with Dr.Shepherd's death, as he was sent to the hospital from a sudden truck crash and died as a result of physician misdiagnosis. It sees that after all the character went through (surviving a plane crash, a gunman, an extreme storm, etc.), to die from the negligence of others seems like an incredible injustice. Furthermore, knowing from both personal experience and from a facet of the stages of grief, anger directed at someone or something can provide comfort where there is little available. This would also help explain why there seemed to be a need for a scapegoat, any scapegoat. Instead of pointing fingers at the nameless characters with ties to Dr.Shepherd's death, many fans turned on the show's director, Shonda Rhimes. It was she who wrote Derek's fate (literally) and killed him off to accomodate the actor leaving the show. While this is mostly harmless and expressed semi-comically on social media, the behavior of grief over Dr.Shepherd's character demonstrates on a basic level how we grieve as a society. This extends primarily to developed countries, as we cannot say for sure how people will react to the show or others like it elsewhere, but similar basic characteristics of grief may still extend.

R.I.P. Dr. Derek Christopher Shepherd. You will be greatly missed.

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