Bruce Willis’ daughter has shared a heartbreaking truth about her father’s health, having written an essay about ‘grief’ and what lies ahead.
Earlier this year, Willis, 68, announced he had frontotemporal dementia - just a year after he retired from acting following an initial aphasia diagnosis.
At the time, his family said in a statement that challenges with communication were ‘just one symptom of the disease Bruce faces’.
“FTD is a cruel disease that many of us have never heard of and can strike anyone,” they said, explaining how it was the most common form of dementia for people under 60.
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“Today there are no treatments for the disease, a reality that we hope can change in the years ahead,” they added.
His daughter Tallulah has now penned a poignant essay for Vogue, detailing how she’d known something was wrong with her father ‘for some time’.
“My family announced in early 2022 that Bruce Willis was suffering from aphasia, a brain-mediated inability to speak or to understand speech, and we learned earlier this year that that symptom was a feature of frontotemporal dementia, a progressive neurological disorder that chips away at his cognition and behavior day by day,” she said.
“But I’ve known that something was wrong for a long time.
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“It started out with a kind of vague unresponsiveness, which the family chalked up to Hollywood hearing loss: ‘Speak up! Die Hard messed with Dad’s ears.’”
When that unresponsiveness ‘broadened’, Tallulah - whose mother is Demi Moore - said she ‘sometimes took it personally’.
“He had had two babies with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, and I thought he’d lost interest in me,” she explained.
“Though this couldn’t have been further from the truth, my adolescent brain tortured itself with some faulty math: I’m not beautiful enough for my mother, I’m not interesting enough for my father.”
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Tallulah revealed that, while her father was ‘quietly struggling’, she was battling her own demons with body dysmorphia and anorexia – and was later diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, an illness that’ impairs the ability to regulate emotions and find stability in relationships’.
“I admit that I have met Bruce’s decline in recent years with a share of avoidance and denial that I’m not proud of,” she said.
“The truth is that I was too sick myself to handle it.”
Tallulah said her dad still knows who she is, ‘give or take a bad day’, and that she tries to ‘savor that time’.
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However, she knows that ‘trials are looming’, saying ‘this is the beginning of grief’.
She added: “There’s this little creature changing by the hour, and there’s this thing happening with my dad that can shift so quickly and unpredictably.
“It feels like a unique and special time in my family, and I’m just so glad to be here for it.”
Topics: Celebrity, Bruce Willis
Jess Hardiman