Legalised assisted dying should “gradually” be extended to dementia sufferers, the author Ian McEwan has said.

McEwan was “shocked by the snow-drilling attempts” by those opposed to the UK’s assisted dying bill, he told a public book event in London, citing its more than 1,000 amendments. MPs and peers backing the bill now believe it is “near impossible” for it to pass the House of Lords before the end of the session in May due to alleged filibustering.

If passed, the bill would legalise assisted dying in England and Wales for adults with less than six months to live. “We’re not asking much,” said McEwan, who is a patron of Dignity in Dying.

“I like it when some bishop says on the radio: ‘It’s the thin end of the wedge,’ and I think yes, it is the thin end of the wedge”, because certain groups are “missing from it”, such as those with dementia. “It has to be physical pain”.

“My guess is that if we pushed it through with all the protections around it – of doctors and dispassionate people making judgments – we’ll look back on this and think, ‘Why did we ever let people die in agony?’”

Asked explicitly if he would add an amendment to extend assisted dying to dementia sufferers, McEwan said: “Gradually, yeah, I would. But I think it does require a lot more thought and the idea of living wills.”

“My mother used to say to me: ‘If I ever become really terrible, I’d like you to finish me off.’ But of course, that’s to commit murder as things stand. Imagine standing up in court and saying: ‘Well, she did say when we were on the beach 20 years ago …’”

McEwan spoke about dementia’s impact on his family – his mother Rose had dementia, as well as his brother-in-law and another close family member. “By the time my mother was well advanced and could not recognise anyone, she was dead. She was alive and dead all at once. It was a terrible thing. And the burden on those closest is also part of the radioactive damage of it all.”

McEwan was speaking at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in central London, as part of its Conversation series, discussing his latest book, What We Can Know, in which dementia is a major theme. He has also written about dementia in previous novels, Lessons and Saturday.

The Atonement author also discussed the new novel he is working on, during a conversation about the ban on social media platforms for under-16s in Australia, and the measure’s potential adoption in the UK. The author said that he is beginning “to wish that the internet didn’t exist. I think back enviously to the 70s, where one of the great luxuries of civilisation – which is solitude – was bounteously available, and has been worn away, and now so much dark stuff is coming out of it. I’m trying to write a novel about this. The disappearance of childhood, or the sense of childhood being under escort.” He said that he was in favour of social media bans.

A major theme of What We Can Know is climate change: the novel is partly set in 2119, at which point Britain has become an archipelago, having been submerged by rising seas. McEwan said that while he has “never known the world in a worse state”, he maintains a “little streak of optimism that we’re going to scrape through”.

What We Can Know has an “emotional background” made up partially of despair, and partially of hope, said the author. If you have children and grandchildren, “you want the human project to survive”. Yet, there’s a “countervailing current” common to all old people, he said – in order to make sense of their lives, people think: “with the end of me, it’ll be the end of everything – ‘après moi, le déluge.’ Elderly pessimism is a very powerful constraint on clear thinking”. He sees What We Can Know as an expression of those “contrary forces”.

“We have two lives,” Dr Matt Morgan writes, before clarifying: “The second begins when you realise you have [only] one.” Sometimes, as the case studies in this book detail, this realisation comes more suddenly and profoundly than most of us can imagine. For more than 20 years, Morgan has been a specialist doctor in intensive care, labouring at the extreme margins of life. Just occasionally, in his day-to-day education in human mortality, he has witnessed what might, in other traditions, be thought of as supernatural events: people whose vital signs have flatlined, but who have returned to tell the tale. The stories in this book – a sequel to his bestselling Critical – are his accounts of those impossible second acts, and his reflections on what we can learn from those lucky few who have experienced both possible answers to the question of “to be or not to be”.

The “deaths” Morgan examines here come in several shapes and sizes. Ed, now 47, was “fatally” struck by lightning at 17 (and had to overcome his guilt at his best friend not being so fortunate); Luca, 30, lost a battle with Covid during the pandemic, but was restored by the blood oxygenation technique ECMO; Summer took her own life at 25, and regretted it even as her breathing petered out; Roberto was frozen solid on a mountain ledge in the Dolomites and did not register a heartbeat for eight hours and 42 minutes before a flicker returned; the former Welsh rugby international Rhys Thomas, after a catastrophic heart attack, has lived for 11 years without a heart at all – an artificial alternative giving him a lease on life while he awaits a transplant.

The news each of these survivors brings from that “undiscovered country… [from which] no traveller returns” is, in individual ways, a kind of double gratitude. First at the unlikely chance and scientific wonder of their deliverance; second at the privilege of their unique knowledge – that never to be forgotten understanding of the once-in-a-lifetime joy of consciousness itself.

Morgan not only tries to inhabit some of this carpe diem wisdom, but to find lasting ways to impart it to his reader (the lessons of the book are both medical parables and memento mori of one sort or another). Describing Roberto’s remarkable revival through hypothermia, for example, Morgan speculates on the theory that another miraculous return, two millennia ago, may have been the result of a comparable phenomenon: “hypothermia induced by crucifixion may have simulated Jesus’s death. His resurrection [might actually have been] through gradual rewarming in a cave with a consistent temperature. Forget the divine intervention; it was more like divine insulation.”

If Morgan is sceptical about acts of gods, he is never complacent about the special magic of lives lived to the full. He takes as his first example of this his wonderful Welsh Aunty Win, whose funeral he attends on his birthday, and whose 97 years he celebrates in a heartfelt eulogy, testament to her “5,044 Saturdays and lazy Sundays, 1,164 bright full moons, six dark solar eclipses, seven houses, five jobs, two proposals. Three billion heartbeats.” It was Win’s example that caused him to start keeping notes that make up this book, about people who came, in far more dramatic circumstances, to her innate understanding that life was for living.

Inevitably, you learn things along the way here that might act as the handiest set of new year resolutions. The ongoing imperative in every life to find meaning; the solace of being in nature; the responsibility not to waste time in bitterness and to always find space for those you love; the necessity of breaking destructive habits and addictions, and to do all you can to inculcate positive alternatives. YOLO – you only live once – may be the overriding message of these survivors’ tales, but that doesn’t mean “splurging your savings, or making bad choices you might regret the next morning… it means finding meaning in the little things that matter. It means being open to new experiences, whether it is swimming in the cold sea or learning to paint, or learning the kazoo,” Morgan writes. “Go on. Go nuts.”

Summer’s near suicide prompts several of these revelatory moments. The first of those truisms is that mundane fact that the ultimate irreversible decision is not always the result of long despair, but of fleeting panic: “Several peer-reviewed research papers have shown that 70% of [suicide] survivors thought about killing themselves for less than half an hour, with a quarter considering it for just five minutes,” Morgan writes. Summer’s subsequent reflections reinforce that tragic understanding; she is among those here who experienced seeing life flash before their mind’s eye as her heart stopped, and her single insistent thought at that moment was this: “People are important, not things.”

Summer’s second life – sustained with the help of eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) and judicious immersion in the video game Tetris – has been an ongoing lesson in mindfulness: “I’m trying to live for the next few moments, not too many more,” she tells Morgan, before delivering that hard-won truth: “The opposite of happiness is not failure, but boredom.”

Morgan proves an excellent guide to such wisdom. He is grateful to bear witness to these stories – and self-effacing about the part he plays in enabling some of them. In the concluding chapter, he attempts to coalesce all of that thinking, to see if it can be ingrained in less life-threatening ways, by staging a collective “living funeral” for friends and colleagues – “eight grown men” – with different experiences of love and loss. At a remote cottage they get to hear what people may say about them after they are gone, and get to think hard about their legacy, about the lives they have touched, about the difference they have made. And then, a little like the survivors Morgan learns from, they get a chance to have another go at it for real.

• A Second Act: What Nearly Dying Teaches Us About Really Living by Dr Matt Morgan is published by Simon & Schuster (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

One might feel short-changed to read a book about death by Sebastian Junger that did not include some battlefield drama. After 1997’s The Perfect Storm, his bestselling account of a trawler disaster that became a blockbuster starring George Clooney, the American writer received even more acclaim for his war reporting. His narrative gifts earned him comparisons with Hemingway.

Sure enough, bullets do fly in Junger’s seventh book, a gripping exploration of the liminal space between life and death. In Afghanistan, he hid behind a meagre holly bush while “bits of leaves drifted down from bullets that were chopping through the foliage over our heads, and gouts of dust erupted around my feet”.

There’s also an account of the death, in Libya in 2011, of British photo­journalist Tim Hetherington, the colleague and friend with whom Junger had just made Restrepo, an Oscar-nominated documentary for which they spent a year at a US army outpost deep in Taliban territory.

But such passages are brief and infrequent. After decades in which he described the impact on body and mind of some of the world’s most hostile environments, it’s Junger himself for whom the bell very nearly tolls in June 2020, in the rather more comfortable setting of his Cape Cod cabin.

It started with abdominal pain but spiralled into semi-consciousness and approaching sirens as “the sky began to turn electric white”. Junger briefly rallied but his wife, Barbara, with whom he has two young daughters, demanded that he be rushed to hospital. “There was something about the way you looked at me without seeing me,” she told Junger later.

It’s in the hospital that the real drama starts. Unbeknown to the writer, he had for much of his life walked around with a “hand grenade” inside him; a rogue ligament had compressed a major artery, increasing pressure on his downstream pancreatic vessels. One of these smaller arteries had burst, causing massive internal bleeding.

A third of Junger’s slim book is therefore a terrifically detailed medical thriller, as suspenseful and pacy as an episode of peak-era ER. I could feel my own pulse quickening as the author’s threatened to stop. There are heroic doctors, bags of blood, and remarkable accounts of the medical innovations that ultimately spare him.

But it’s what happens to Junger’s mind that shakes him most. At the very point he comes closest to dying (and we’re talking seconds away) his father appears above him and slightly to his left, gently reassuring him and seeming to invite his son to join him, eight years after his own death. “He was not so much a vision as a mass of energy configured in a deeply familiar way as my father,” Junger writes.

Miguel Junger was an immigrant scientist whose rigidly rational belief system Sebastian would inherit, deepening the confusion that followed the near-death phenomenon. The rest of the book is an existential quest for understanding, as demonstrated by a vertiginous list of sources that includes studies about everything from limbic lobe dysfunction to “the near-death experience as a shamanic initiation”.

Junger has joined a blessed cohort of people who have seen death and returned to describe it. He finds remarkable patterns in other such accounts, across time, cultures and religions, and dives deep into the links between the work of the great physicists and our understanding of human consciousness (there’s also a remarkable familial link; Erwin Schrödinger, of cat fame, once had an affair with Junger’s great-aunt).

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Some of the subatomic stuff is inevitably harder to digest than the hospital drama, but it remains compelling in Junger’s hands. I found his search for the nature and meaning of death – an atheist’s open-minded grappling with the unknowable – to be at once reassuring and troubling; it would be hard not to read it without wondering what flashes and visions might have greeted loved ones who didn’t make it back from the brink. This book is one reason to be relieved that Junger did.

The assisted dying advocate and bestselling author Wendy Mitchell, who spent years documenting her dementia, has died, her family has said.

Mitchell, 68, discussed her death in a letter published posthumously on her blog on Thursday.

“If you’re reading this, it means this has probably been posted by my daughters as I’ve sadly died,” she wrote. In the letter shared on her site Which Me Am I Today? Mitchell said she died after deciding to stop eating and drinking, and called for assisted dying to be legalised in the UK.

“In the end, I died simply by deciding not to eat or drink any more. The last cuppa tea … my final hug in a mug, the hardest thing to let go of, much harder than the food I never craved … Dementia is a cruel disease that plays tricks on your very existence.

“I’ve always been a glass-half-full person, trying to turn the negatives of life around and creating positives, because that’s how I cope.”

The mother of two, from Yorkshire, was diagnosed with early onset dementia aged 58 in 2014. She was an ambassador at the Alzheimer’s Society and wrote two Sunday Times bestsellers, her 2018 memoir titled Somebody I Used to Know, and a guide to the disease called What I Wish People Knew About Dementia published in 2022.

The former NHS worker said: “Sorry to break the news to you this way, but if I hadn’t, my inbox would eventually have been full of emails asking if I’m OK, which would have been hard for my daughters to answer.”

Her final book One Last Thing: How to Live With the End in Mind covers assisted dying.

In her posthumous blogpost, Mitchell argued people should be able to chose between euthanasia and palliative care, and added that she had wanted to go to Dignitas in Switzerland, a non-profit clinic that provides “physician-assisted suicide”.

She said: “It’s amazing how such little value is placed on the act of dying. If assisted dying was available in this country, I would have chosen it in a heartbeat, but it isn’t.

“I didn’t want dementia to take me into the later stages; that stage where I’m reliant on others for my daily needs; others deciding for me when I shower or maybe insisting I had a bath, which I hate; or when and what I eat and drink. I was hoping to go [to Dignitas] at the beginning of the year.”

Mitchell’s daughters, Sarah and Gemma, announced her death on social media, telling followers she had “died peacefully”.