8:07pm, a mo{nu}ment: creative relational enactments of mourning

This thesis explores grief and loss as complex, non-linear experiences by following “the clocks of the dead,” challenging conventional cultural assumptions of linear time, closure, and the notion of “moving on” after death. Drawing on Kurt Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorian time, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Aion time, and the collaborative, everyday theorizing of Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, it enacts grief as both inquiry and becoming; a creative-relational practice that holds the dead in life, insistently and vividly. Through mo{nu}ments, splinters, refrains, and rituals, this work transforms grief into generative force. 8:07 pm, the time of Patrick’s death, resounds endlessly, shaping experience and theory alike. The hyphen between life and death becomes vaporous, porous, a site of emergence where memory, sensation, and story coalesce and unravel. Grief, here, is not a process to complete but a living composition, a rhythm of return, a site of negotiation and transformation. From widow to witch, the work enacts symbolic reclamation, challenging dominant frameworks of mourning, and reimagining relational continuity beyond presence. Writing itself becomes ritual: language splinters, bleeds, lingers, refracts. The thesis performs loss rather than containing it, breaking open conventional narratives to allow rupture, shimmering in splinters. It circulates between articulation and silence, visibility and the unseen, presence and absence. Recursive, jagged, fragmentary, it resists cohesion, instead breathing the poetics of disorientation and inhabiting grief as both sensory and theoretical experience. In this restless engagement, mourning becomes a living, evolving entity: a space where words, memories, and practices persist, where grief is enacted as relational, ongoing, and dynamic. The thesis invites readers into the tension of enduring loss, to dwell with absence, to inhabit rupture, and to recognize the strange, persistent life of those no longer corporeally present. It is a mo{nu}ment, a bleeding, porous, jagged composition of survival, remembrance, and the extraordinary, continuous life of mourning itself.