A Window Onto Grief
Windower by Michael Loughran (Ohio State University Press, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
“On May 31st of the year in question, I came home to find my wife had died. I wrote this book to discover what my grief had been, or is. In November of that same year, I fell in love again. I wrote this book, also, to learn how that could be” (13). It would be impossible to frame Windower better than its author, the poet Michael Loughran, does in its opening pages.
As you will imagine, much of Windower is very sad. Loughran is racked by grief and guilt, like others who have lost loved ones to suicide. He moves out of his house, he camps in his parents’ yard, and he struggles to fully understand what has happened and how he should understand his own role in the tragic events. As the book progresses, he reveals different details of the story and extends the depth of his telling in a way which reflects the nature of processing something like this. This kind of experience cannot be described or comprehended all at once.
As a poet, Loughran is especially attuned to the role of language in his story. How should he describe his wife’s death? Was she “killed by suicide” or “murdered by herself” or something else? What should he call himself? He feels like a ghost, no longer able to fully inhabit his old life and cast out from living in his old world. He writes, “When she died, I became the ghost, not her” (38). He prefers “windower” to “widower” and windows appear at various times in the book. Once Loughran explains how someone else appreciates a window and “how it honors the natural world by framing it… A window is a guide, he thinks, a kindness…. Stay here, says a window or a fence, stay here to look and eat, it’s good here” (24). What Loughran is trying to open a window onto is his own grief and guilt.
Loughran is also a college professor and after the death of his wife, Noelle, he changed the syllabus in one of his classes so that the students only read The Oresteia—in four different translations. This is a dramatic choice in every way. Getting students to read the same trilogy four times is a challenge. The three ancient Greek plays of The Oresteia by Aeschylus are also bloody and dramatic. The events take place after the fall of Troy, when Agamemnon returns home and is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra. She is avenging their daughter, sacrificed by Agamemnon to the gods. In response, their son Orestes murders his mother, to avenge the death of his father. There are other deaths besides and sordid backstories and the gods demand vengeance. Everything is driven by vengeance and the desire to make right wrongs that have been built on other wrongs.
Yet, despite his obedience to Apollo in the killing of his mother, Orestes is guilty of matricide and has violated one of the most ancient laws written on our hearts. As a consequence, he is hounded by the Furies, ancient Greek gods, who are older than the Olympians. They are hideous and horrible and inescapable. Loughlan describes them as “colossal bloodthirsty snake-haired murderous hell-birds” (112). The Furies pursue and torment Orestes, intent on vengeance, until Athena intervenes and, also, finds a way to tame the Furies.
The Furies appear throughout Windower, pursuing Loughran. As he flees them and, at times, faces them, he lays bare not only his own grief, but his own role in his wife’s unhappiness. He does not spare himself in the telling of the story. He does not beautify the people or events in the book through flowery language, often preferring the coarse. There are moments when the Furies confront him. They call him a monster and he wonders if they are right. His burgeoning happiness with a new woman, MJ, only adds to the anger of the Furies. What is it he deserves? Athena does not arrive and organize a jury. It seems he must decide for himself, with some guidance from others.
Windower defies easy genre categorization. Put out by the Ohio State University Press, more specifically it was published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. But the front cover indicates that it categorized as “essay.” The genre ambiguity fits perfectly with the content. Some parts of Windower are conventional narrative, some parts are like poetry, and some parts are accounts of inner monologues or counseling sessions. There are recurring images and metaphors and stories that unfurl gradually, spaced out across the text. Taken together, it works well to capture grief and falling in love unexpectedly, things filled with many types of experiences and expressions. The subject matter may sometimes create unease, but the conversational tone of Windower makes it easy to read.
Windower is clearly, as the back of the book says, part of the “grief canon.” But it is also a slice of life. It comes from a Philadelphia of art shows and neighborhoods and adults who see live music and smoke cigarettes. Loughran writes about when he fell in love with his first wife: “That was the summer I was learning Noelle’s Philadelphia—how to walk to the movies through the old cemetery; the Chinese takeout with the butterfly collection on the wall; the TLA staff picks; the 700 Club and Standard Tap; Bikram Yoga; AKA” (74). Several passages involve the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “On pay-as-you-can Sundays at the museum Noelle and I used to sit on the Rocky steps with coffee and then pay $1 to sit in the Duchamp room” (78). The museum remains in his life after Noelle’s death. He goes with friends and with students. Beholding a specific painting triggers something in him. He has different feelings on different streets and in different neighborhoods. The lives in Windower are not just lives which could happen anywhere, they are lives which happen in a specific context. The inclusion of place adds a richness that is absent in some other books.
In Windower, Loughran frames his experiences and his anxieties as he wrestles with reaching a conclusion on some topics. Toward the end of the book, he writes: “I don’t want to know if loving MJ was part of my grief or if Noelle dying was part of loving MJ. I don’t want to say it depends on how you begin the story. I don’t want to be the person who says that” (175). The Furies call him a monster, but as he gradually pieces his life together and makes an uneasy peace with his past and marries MJ, he reluctantly considers seeing himself as something other than a monster. At the end of The Oresteia, the Furies are turned to the Eumenides, the “kindly ones” who look after Athens. In the final chapter of this book, Loughran and the Furies are both transformed. He can shamelessly hold the hand of the woman he loves and he can say, “I’m a lucky man” (188).
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023). She is also a contributing editor and associate books editor at Front Porch Republic.
