The Line Tender

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses the death of a parent and the death of a child.

The Line Tender contrasts characters who isolate themselves after a loss with characters who share their grief with others. In this way, the author shows that being part of a community is essential to a healthy grieving process. At the start of the novel, Lucy, Sookie, and Lucy’s father, Tom, are disconnected from one another, not sharing their feelings about Lucy’s mother’s death. When Sookie catches the first great white shark, he doesn’t call a biologist, even at Fred’s insistence, because it would remind him too much of Lucy’s mother. Also, both Lucy and Tom hide their emotional reactions to the shark from one another, claiming that their red faces are just due to the July heat. That night, instead of discussing the shark and the memories it brings up of his wife, Tom leaves Lucy alone in the house to go scuba diving in a storm. While all three characters are still grieving Lucy’s mother’s death, they don’t share their grief with each other and are therefore unable to move forward. As Lucy explains, “when [her] mom collapsed on the boat, things stopped happening in the usual way” (91). Her mother’s death is traumatic in itself, but it is also upsetting because it caused these characters to shut down emotionally, gradually causing them to become distant and dishonest with one another.

After Fred’s death, Lucy and her father continue to isolate themselves from each other. Lucy looks to newspapers for details about Fred’s accident instead of talking to her father because “[she] [knows] Dad. Sometimes he [doesn’t] like to talk about the things [she] want[s] to talk about the most” (127). Lucy is used to his distant demeanor after her mother’s death, and though she is struggling and needs someone to talk to, she knows that she can’t count on her father for that. Mr. Patterson encourages Lucy to talk to Fiona, Fred’s sister, and Maggie, Fred’s mother, because he thinks they “could use each other” (130). Mr. Patterson’s suggestion marks a turning point in Lucy’s relationship to her community; she starts talking about Fred to Maggie, Fiona, and Sookie, opening herself to grieving with others. Fiona gives Lucy Fred’s backpack, which holds the field guide, the proposal, and the mermaid necklace. This gift represents how Lucy’s community is giving her the tools she needs to process her grief and move through it, rather than remaining stuck in grief like her father. Lucy’s rediscovery of her mother’s research encourages Sookie to reconnect with Lucy’s father, too. As more characters speak openly about Lucy’s mother death, Lucy finally processes her sorrow that her mother will never know her as an adult. 

Lucy’s journey to connect with people from her mother’s past also inspires Mr. Patterson to scatter his wife’s ashes, which is another example of community empowering healthy expressions of grief. Lucy, Sookie, Tom, and Mr. Patterson take a road trip together to Maine, where Lucy meets Vern, and this also indicates that these characters are now in a group; this is a contrast to the opening of the novel when Lucy was alone at home while her father left her and went scuba diving, also alone. After Mr. Patterson scatters his wife’s ashes, Sookie remembers some advice from Lucy’s mother: “Don’t resist pain” (261). Resisting pain would result in an inability to move past it, but in the past, these characters resisted it because confronting it was too painful. However, each of them finds the strength to face their pain by sharing their grief with others. The final scene of the novel highlights this theme: Lucy completes her mother’s research project alongside others who were affected by her mother’s and Fred’s deaths, and she sees two great white sharks—typically solitary creatures—who have paired up together. These sharks, named after Fred and Lucy’s mother, Helen, represent how these characters, like the sharks, have left their solitariness behind and have found solace in community.