Memento Mori by Jonathan Nolan

I took Latin in high school for two years, and in reading the title "Memento Mori" I immediately remembered the word "mori" had something to do with death; so that's what I imagined the short story, by Jonathan Nolan, would be based on. Then when I finished, I looked up the literal translation and it is a Latin phrase that means "be mindful of death" or could be translated as "remember that you are mortal." This is a short story about a man named Earl with a disease he calls "backwards amnesia," which means his brain cannot make new memories. Earl calls himself "the ten minute man" because that's usually how long he can hold onto a memory. Nolan never says what happened to cause Earl's head injury and his wife's death explicitly in the story but as a reader you assume they were probably attacked. Through out the story Earl has to leave himself notes, lists, even get tattoos in order to help him remember his main purpose in life is to find and kill the man who is responsible for his wife's death, because according the half of Earl that remembers situations his "life is over" he's "a dead man." Earl comes back to the theme of death over and over, and how time no longer affects him. He says at the end time for him means nothing, and the moment is the only thing that matters because that's all he has, which is why I think that the title "Memento Mori" is very fitting.
I truly enjoyed the way in which Nolan wrote this short story. It was very descriptive, especially when Earl is writing the letters; it kind of made me feel like the letters were written to me. Nolan forced me to think critically about the way we view time, I honestly didn't really think about which of the three ways I viewed time prior to reading this short story. I guess I am the type of person who lives in the safety of the moment after the moment in which I felt something powerful. I'm someone who lives in the here and now, and that has had it's advantages and disadvantages for me in the past.