The death of Derek Shepherd, commonly known as Dr. McDreamy, has crushed Grey's Anatomy fans across the nation. We've been invested in his career, his life, since 2005. How could we not be broken after his death? We were there for him through everything over the past ten years. A hospital shooting, a deadly plane crash; we watched him survive through it all. We followed the life of this beautiful and seemingly invincible man.

And then we lost him.

We let out sighs of relief as he safely got back into his car after saving three lives. We watched as he made an effort to turn his car around on the highway. But our hearts raced as he looked down for his phone, mid three-point-turn, in the middle of the road. And then our hearts stopped as the giant truck came at him. Soon after, he was pronounced brain dead as he lay on an operating table surrounded by incompetent surgeons. And what did we do? We proceeded to drown in our own tears. Because it felt like real life.

Why does it hurt so bad?
What's the reason we're so upset about this death? Nobody actually died. Derek Shepherd isn't real, and Patrick Dempsey is still very much alive. But it's not Patrick that we loved so much, it was Derek.

If you search a TV character on IMDB or Wikia, you can find an entire bio for them, just like how you could for an actor. A good writer gives each of her story's characters a life, a back-story, a true personality. They don't exist, but the actors who embody them do. They are physical bodies that we can see and touch, so when they're acting as these made-up characters, the characters are brought to life. They're real to us.

Psychology Today tells us that a big reason for our intense attachment to TV characters is because of “the personal nature of the relationship we have with our television. Unlike movie actors, or those in plays onstage, television actors come into our homes, and given the popularity of DVR-devices, these actors are available to us whenever we want to watch them." We bring these characters into our own personal spaces and form intimate relationships with them, just as we would with a close friend or lover. So duh we feel super close to Derek. He's been in our beds!

Belief vs. Alief
An article titled Alief and Belief written by Yale philosopher Tamar Szabó Gendler argues that we have two cognitive states, alief and belief. Through her opening examples, Gendler defines beliefs as conscious responses to how we think things are. Aliefs, however are those responses to how things seem.

She defines Alief as:
“A mental state with associatively-linked content that is representational, affective, and behavioral, and that is activated consciously or unconsciously – by features of the subject's internal or ambient environment. Alief is a more primitive state than either belief or imagination: it directly activated behavioral response patterns."

In other words, our alief system is what caused us to react so emotionally when Derek died. We believed that what we were watching was fiction. We knew it wasn't really happening to a real person, but we alieved that something terrible was happening and our sympathy or empathy for the loss of his life and for his family. Gendler suggests that in moments like this, the belief may be temporarily forgotten, overtaken by the alief. The acting, the scene that is set, is visually and audibly so realistic that our minds are deceived. She tells us to think about it this way:
You set your watch five minutes fast. It's unlikely that you'll forget that the watch is inaccurate or that you'll doubt that it's really five minutes earlier than it looks. However, the visual of looking at the time is what activates response patterns and motor routines (i.e. feeling urgent, muscles tensing), and your behavior will follow suit.

It's OK.
We wouldn't be able to have these reactions to fiction without having had real-life experiences. Howard Sklar, a postdoctoral researcher in the English Philology Unit at the University of Helsinki, says that the way we respond to fictional characters “has a lot to do with our ability to connect with others and to feel for a person's situation." We need to have deep connections with others and those human interactions in order to feel so deeply for fictional characters.

So let yourself mourn Derek Shepherd, and don't feel too bad about those late nights in bed with Tim Riggins, Lucas Scott, or whoever your fictional man of choice is lately. Just don't forget that fiction is not reality, and the best part of reality is that we get to live it.

Tamar Szabó Gendler. Alief and Belief.
http://www.pgrim.org/philosophersannual/pa28articl...