Over the past several weeks, the wife of legendary actor Bruce Willis, Emma Heming Willis, has been sharing some details about her husband’s worsening condition as he continues to battle frontotemporal dementia (FTD).
In a recent interview promoting her upcoming book, Emma & Bruce Willis: The Unexpected Journey, which is slated to hit shelves on Tuesday, Sept. 9, Emma Heming Willis has revealed that her husband’s brain is “failing him” and that he no longer lives in the family home.
As Willis continues his battle, a recent photo has shown him surrounded by family, including his ex-wife, actress Demi Moore.
Bruce Willis’ Brain is ‘Failing Him’
During the interview with Diane Sawyer of ABC News, the actor’s wife said that while Willis is in “great health” physically, his brain is “failing him.”
“Bruce is still very mobile,” she said. “Bruce is in really great health overall, you know. It’s just his brain that is failing him.”
Heming Willis explained that his condition is worsening, revealing that the Die Hard actor’s language has started to fail, forcing them to have to communicate in other ways.
“The language is going, and, you know, we’ve learned to adapt,” she continued. “And we have a way of communicating with him, which is just a … different way.”
Heming Willis got emotional as she opened up about seeing glimpses of her husband and his true personality come through despite his condition.
“Not days, but we get moments. It’s his laugh, right? He has such a hearty laugh. And sometimes you’ll see that twinkle in his eye, or that smirk. I just get transported,” Heming Willis said, getting emotional. “And it’s just hard to see, because as quickly as those moments appear, then it goes.”
Willis Moves Out of Family Home
As Willis’ condition worsens, the actor’s wife has made the decision to move him out of the family home.
Willis and Emma Heming Willis have two daughters together, 13-year-old Mabel and 11-year-old Evelyn. Heming Willis explained that the difficult decision was made in large part for the benefit of their daughters, which she says he would want.
“Bruce would want that for our daughters,” she told Sawyer. “He would want them to be in a home that was more tailored to their needs, not his needs.”
Though she knows it’s for the best and her husband is now living with a full-time care team, she called the move the “hardest decision,” but she has tried to take her daughters to visit him “a lot.” She also defended the move against criticism.
New Family Photo Surfaces
As Willis continues to battle the degenerative brain disease, it’s clear that he has been surrounded by loved ones. And some recent photos have surfaced showing the actor with his family.
In the photos, the 70-year-old actor poses with his wife Emma Heming Willis, ex-wife and Oscar nominee Demi Moore, and their daughters in exclusive Vanity Fair photos published on Sept. 5, taken by photographer Norman Jean Roy.
“When Emma Heming married Bruce Willis in a family-and-friends-only ceremony at Parrot Cay, he was in his prime as one of the world’s most famous movie stars, an alpha male with a wink to beat them all. Emma, so prone to catastrophizing, knew she had found her soulmate—the guy who could save the world, as one friend puts it. But even in her worst imaginings, she tells @peelebanana all these years later, she could never have pictured the fate that would ultimately befall them. By the time she understood what exactly was happening to Bruce, his disease had progressed to the point that he would never know what had happened to him,” Variety wrote in the caption of the post on Instagram.
“Willis’s frontotemporal dementia has changed the couple’s lives—and the lives of everyone in their family, including Demi Moore and Willis’s children with her. Now Emma tells VF how it all happened, and how she is helping other caregivers and families through the experience of the longest goodbye.”
