Bruce Willis' Wife Emma Clarifies Misconception About His Dementia

Bruce Willis’ Wife Emma Heming Willis Says He “Doesn’t Know” About Dementia Diagnosis

Emma Heming Willis is correcting the narrative around Bruce Willis’ diagnosis.

Three years after his family announced that the Die Hard actor had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), his wife of 17 years explained that the disease—which affects the frontal lobe and the temporal lobes—actually has “three different variants.”

“The one that Bruce has affects language,” Heming shared on the June 15 episode of Bossticks. “But there’s another variant that will affect behavior and another one that could affect movement.”

The 47-year-old noted that Willis’ FTD does not affect his memory and that he still remembers her and their daughters Mabel, 14, and Evelyn, 12, as well as his daughters Rumer, 37, Scout, 34, and Tallulah, 32, who he shares with ex-wife Demi Moore.

“That’s a different part of the brain. So when people say, ‘Oh, does he remember who you are?’ Well, he does because he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, he has FTD,” Heming said. “I think that’s a very common misconception that, when you think of dementia, we think of memory loss.”

And while Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia, the model added that “FTD is the most common form of dementia for people under the age of 60.”

Willis’ diagnosis has also meant that she has found herself in the role of caretaker for the 71-year-old, which feels to her like she’s facing an “ambiguous loss.”

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“It’s grieving someone who is alive,” she explained of the term. “And that is what many people who are caregivers to someone with dementia experience, because your person is there physically but maybe not mentally or emotionally.”

She’s also found that all forms of dementia “take and they take and they take, sometimes very slowly,” meaning that Heming and those in her position can feel like they are “grieving different losses all the time.”

“You are consistently in grief. I've just learned how to navigate it,” she said. “Maybe I'm a little bit more used to it at this point than I was early on. But yeah, you are just sitting with it and moving alongside of it.”

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Much like Heming, Willis’ children have also felt the wide range of emotions that can appear when navigating FTD, although daughter Rumer has found one silver lining.

“I love getting over to go see him,” Rumer—who shares daughter Louetta, 3, with ex Derek Richard Thomas—explained on The Inside Edit in May. “I’m so grateful that I have a child that got to meet him because I don’t know if my sisters will have that.”

She has even noticed a change in her father’s demeanor since his FTD diagnosis.

“There’s this sweetness,” Rumer said. “He’s always been this macho dude and now there’s this—fragile is not the right word—but like a tenderness that maybe being Bruce Willis might not have allowed him in a way.”

For more about Willis’ family, keep reading.

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