Bruce Willis was first diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in February 2023. Since then, his wife Emma Heming Willis has been his main caretaker and in charge of his condition.
Now, she is opening up about everything she knows.
Emma Heming Willis has been very open about the struggles her family has faced since her husband, actor Bruce Willis, was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD).
Emma has been open about what she has been going through since her husband was diagnosed with the disease. She recently recalled a warning her husband’s neurologist had given her when he was diagnosing Bruce: to remember to take care of herself as well.
“Caregiving can be really harmful to your health,” she recently recalled being told. “I didn’t know that, and I was grateful, yet alarmed, that his neurologist shared that with me, and that was a call for me to start taking care of myself, not just for Bruce but for our two young daughters.”
One of the first signs of his dementia diagnosis was the return of a childhood stutter. This wrongly led to doctors assuming he might be suffering from aphasia, a language disorder resulting from damage to the brain’s language centers. The most common cause for this is a stroke, which impacts a person’s ability to read, ride, and understand.
Emma revealed the shock the diagnosis had caused her. Emma revealed, “Bruce had a severe stutter when he was a child that he held onto, actually, his life, but was able to kind of get a handle on it, I think, in his adult years. Then I started seeing that it started coming back. Never in my wildest dreams would I think that was now becoming a symptom of FTD.”
Emma however took everything in her stride but the diagnosis was devastating for Willis’ youngest two children, Mabel, 13 and Evelyn, 11. The two young girls watched their father’s health deteriorate within months.
Emma admitted that her daughters began grieving their father and that they missed who he was prior to his illness.
“They miss their dad so much,” she said in the interview. “He’s missing important milestones. That’s tough for them. But kids are resilient. [Although] I used to hate hearing that because people didn’t understand what we were walking through. I don’t know if my kids will ever bounce back. But they’re learning, and so am I.”
This is so heartbreaking. We are sending the Heming-Willis family our thoughts and prayers in this difficult time.
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