Dear Shonda,

Breakups are hard. I get it. You have all this history with someone – remembering how you’d sit down together on Thursday nights to watch Grey’s Anatomy because DVRs didn’t exist yet (or maybe you were just too cheap to pay for one). You remember rolling your eyes at teased scenarios, thinking they could never be pulled off with the kind of emotional depth that was needed — the gunman, the plane crash, the ferry accident, Denny, etc. etc. etc. — only to bawl your eyes out each and every time. It’s these memories that keep you coming back each week, hoping to relieve that same emotional spark you felt when Cristina told Meredith that Derek was not the sun.

But not all relationships are meant to last forever. Indeed, they often run their course well before people are willing to give up on them, leaving both sides frustrated with the mediocre effort of having Teddy sleep with Owen on the day of her wedding while accidentally leaving him a voice message of her sex noises. It’s like you can tell your heart just isn’t in it anymore.

Then there are the intentional sabotages. You know, where one person tries to provoke a breakup by being hideously awful. Like wrapping up 16 years (YEARS!) of Alex Karev’s story with an off-page exit to a women who left the show 10 years earlier and having it explained in a letter. Or slapping April back together with Matt and announcing her departure without a single hint of foreshadowing, only to throw Jackson into the same terrible plot line several seasons later because it was perhaps too much effort to come up with anything else for him.

The truth is, we should have seen it coming. We excused it for a long time, trying to rationalize that maybe Izzie having sex with a ghost really was a believable side effect of having a brain tumor, or that Cristina’s “texts” to Meredith meant their friendship was alive and well and could somehow still carry plot points, or even that somehow on this Earth there were three different women who could fall in love with Owen Hunt. We may not have always liked it, but we were willing to forgive the errors because we kept alive the memory of those two people who were impaled by a pole together.

But now you’ve escalated things. Grey’s was recently announced to have been renewed for another season, which cannot possibly be because we’ve spent half of this last season tearing our hair out as Meredith runs through a Big Fish-farewell to every single dead character on the show on her way to the ocean as she debates the merits of living or dying. It’s been excruciating, but again, we excused it because it seemed like this was a clumsy attempt at a wrap up. But to find it wasn’t? That all the while we thought you were giving us a sentimental send-off, that you’re redecorating the house like everything is fine?

WE ARE NOT FINE, SHONDA. WE HAVE NOT BEEN FINE FOR A LONG TIME.

We are on life support, being kept alive by machines and looking unrecognizable, not unlike whoever has been lying in that Covid bed pretending to be Meredith. We cannot take a new season where Nico Kim remains, in the words of Gloria Delgado from Modern Family, “a stone cold 10” while Schmitt is “a Utah 7.” We cannot bear to watch you destroy Amelia with more poor decision making after she’s finally gotten her life together. We will not stand for you inflicting something else on poor Richard Webber, who has already endured electrocution, alcoholism, an optic nerve tumor, his wife’s Alzheimer’s and death, termination from his job, and cobalt poisoning.

Please. Please. I am begging you. Break up with us. Dump us. There’s no need for a poignant goodbye at this point. We’re well past the point of expecting good send-offs for anyone. We just want you out of the house so we can change the locks before you barge back in with yet another Station 19 crossover episode literally no one is asking for.

We just want peace.

Sincerely, all of us (yes, literally all of us)