Ellen Pompeo may have made her directorial debut on Grey's Anatomy last week but it was Kelly McCreary's Maggie who took center stage in "Be Still, My Soul." The emotional hour focused on a desperate Maggie putting her mother Diane (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) on an aggressive experimental treatment in attempt to save her from inflammatory breast cancer and firing Meredith (Pompeo) as her mother's surgeon in the process. Unfortunately, Diane passed away after complications from the clinical trial. Grey's Anatomy Recap: Is Maggie Able to Save Her Mother?>>>

According to McCreary, who went through a range of emotions in the episode, she struggled with her character's tough situation. She also had to put herself in Maggie's shoes as she prepared for the inevitable tragedy.

"To prepare, I did a lot of reading about IBC and the treatments, just the way that Maggie goes through trying to find out about what other patients had experienced," she continued. "In other words, I did research in the same way that Maggie did as she was trying to figure out how to treat her mother."

Despite the devastating loss that will surely have an immense impact on Maggie's life moving forward, McCreary takes some comfort in knowing that Maggie was able to make peace with her mother before she died.

McCreary also believes that Maggie will stay true to her character even while suffering the loss of her mom. "That's who Maggie is at her core," McCreary says of Maggie's optimism. "I don't think that this is going to change that. But I do think she's going to take to heart all of that lovely advice that her mom gave her in her final moments, when she told Maggie to just live life more fully and give herself permission to be a little messy."

"Are we going to see Maggie go dark? I don't know what the future holds, but Maggie will grieve in the way that seems, from the outside, to be relatively healthy. The thing about grief is that we think of it in stages, or we've been told that it's stages, but those stages go in cycles. So when she gets to anger, or returns to anger or denial, maybe some dark stuff will come up then," she explained.

Obviously Maggie will have to lean on Meredith at this very difficult time and hopefully what they have or have gone through will be stronger than the outcome of the whole Nathan situation.

"Maggie's mom has died now. So, the question of whether Meredith should have told her becomes less about the fact that they are together and Maggie wants him. It's less about the fact that Meredith took something that Maggie wanted, and more about ... something else. ... It's not about Meredith taking the boy Maggie had a crush on. Maggie has experienced something that makes that sort of trivial at this point. I don't want to give too much away about that storyline, because it is one of the major questions left to be answered this season," she told TV Guide.

"I think that it will definitely bring her closer to Meredith -- and Amelia, too, with the loss of her father. Even though the circumstances are completely different, they share something that they didn't share before, and it'll bring a new level of understanding and closeness, I think, to those relationships," she added.

(Image courtesy of ABC)

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'Grey's Anatomy' Star Kelly McCreary Discusses Filming Maggie's ... - BuddyTV (blog)