If you had told me, at the beginning of this season, or even after the strike break, that I would give the finale and A and be in tears while I did it, I'd say you were on crack. But hey, I guess it looks like we should pass the pipe around!

Andrew is finally freed from the cement, and as predicted his heart immediately stops. But they're prepared, and he's rushed into surgery. After a few hours, while Hahn is elsewhere, he has a heart problem. Cristina asserts that she can do it and that they'll lose too much time calling Hahn, so Richard lets her go ahead. When Hahn gets in and sees what is happening, she flips her shit and screams at Cristina, who awesomely tells her to shut up. Later, Richard gives Hahn a talking to and says that if she wants to stay, she needs to be a better teacher. He then admonishes Cristina, who heard it, not to make him regret standing up for her. Lesson learned, Cristina calls in Lexie and begins to teach her how to do stitches on a banana.

Lexie and George get in a big fight over her telling him about his one-point failure, and how she only proved that once again, he lost out by a hair. But she tells him about his letters of recommendation and how he had more than any of his friends, and how they were better because they talked about what an amazing person he was. This gives George what he needs to stand up to the Chief and say that he should be doing more than he is right now, and to his surprise and delight the Chief tells him he can take the exam again. He runs home to tell Lexie and gives her a kiss, which clearly means quite a lot to her by the way she touches her lips afterward.

Andrew has survived, and Bailey tells him that she kept her promise that he would live and she also finally figured out the big picture. She gives Izzie the keys to the clinic and hands it over to Izzie's care, declaring that she loves surgery and her family more than the clinic and realized she needed to let something go. She tells Izzie she earned it and I have to admit that she did. She stands up to Alex, who is really perfecting his asshole persona with Izzie while insisting he can take care of Ava. Izzie knows he can't and calls a psych consult, which results in Ava being committed. In the process, she learns that Alex had to do all of this once before, when he was a kid, for his own mom. That night she apologizes to him and won't let him brush it off. He kisses her, and begs her to stay the night with him while he cries. About here is where my hanky came out.

Derek is totally demoralized by their first patient dying and doesn’t want to operate on Beth, but she insists. Before they begin, he tells Meredith he never wants to see her again afterward. But naturally, this is the surgery where they succeed, and Beth winds up waking up with a smaller tumor and function back in her left arm. Derek grabs the bottle of champagne that he threw in the trash and runs to find Meredith. After Beth's surgery she went home to find Ava's blood all over the kitchen, just like her mom's, but realizes that her mom didn't really want to die, she wanted Richard to come after her, but she was too proud to tell him that. She also wanted Meredith to be an extraordinary human being, not just a surgeon. Meredith finally feels healed, and runs off to find Derek at the trailer, while he's looking for her at her house. When he finally gets back, he finds that she's laid out the floorplan of their house in candles, and he breaks into her yelling about how she just made a fool of herself by kissing her. I grabbed the whole box of Kleenex about now.

And in other kissing news, Richard goes to Adele and tells her that he's a good man who knows he treated her badly but he wants to come home, and she welcomes him back. Mark gets Callie to realize that she wants Hahn more than she wants him, and so after work Callie goes and plants a kiss on her. And after Meredith and Derek kiss, he leaves to go break up with Rose, because he doesn’t want to be a complete dog when he and Meredith re-consummate their relationship. Welcome back, Grey's!

Missed the first half of the two-parter? Read all about it here!