The Latin phrase, momento mori, means “Remember that you must die” and has a long and fractured history around the world in various practices and traditions associated with a remembrance of our mortality.

Those who have read G.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series may associate momento mori with the phrase valor morgulous, spoken in the fictional language of High Valarian as a somber farewell meaning, “All men must die” and usually met with the response valar dohaeris or “All men must serve.” Historically the phrase is not simply a morbid reminder of the ever-looming specter of death, it is also meditation on the light: the meaning we interpret and create with lived experience.

In this audio recording, Jonathan Nolan reads his short story where a man without the capacity to form new long-term memories struggles to overcome his 10-minute memory to exact revenge following the death of his wife in an attack that also caused his brain affliction.