Bruce Willis’ wife: “I don’t sugarcoat anything in front of the kids”

Emma Heming Willis has used her reach and the fame of her husband Bruce Willis to raise awareness for years about the illness that brought an early end to Willis’ Hollywood career. The “Die Hard” star suffers from frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The path to the diagnosis was long and exhausting, as Heming Willis now tells in an interview with the magazine “Town and Country”. “This disease is misdiagnosed, it’s overlooked, it’s misunderstood, and so it was important to finally get a diagnosis so that I could learn what frontotemporal dementia is and so that I could educate our children,” she says.

The Willis couple have two daughters together, and Bruce Willis also has three daughters with his ex-wife Demi Moore. The entire patchwork family gets along well and grew closer together after the actor’s diagnosis. In an interview with the magazine, Heming Willis also reveals how she talks to her daughters about their father’s illness. “I’ve never tried to sugarcoat anything for them. They’ve grown up with Bruce’s decline over the years. I’m not trying to protect them from it,” she explains.

How do you deal when a parent is seriously ill? The couple’s daughters are just ten and twelve years old. “I learned from our therapist that when children ask questions, they are ready to know the answer,” she said. “When we saw that Bruce was having problems, I would bring it up with the children so they could understand, but this disease is chronic, progressive and incurable. There is no cure. Of course I don’t like to talk about this aspect of the disease, and they didn’t specifically ask. They know that daddy won’t get well,” says Heming Willis.

The first sign of Willis’ illness was a stutter. The speech impediment did not particularly concern those around him because the actor stuttered as a child. His job and memorizing a script helped him. “I would never have thought that it could be a form of dementia in someone so young,” remembers his wife. She took over the care of her husband – with support. How other affected people manage to care for a relative on their own is incomprehensible and admirable to them.

She still mourns the future she won’t have. “We had so many plans, so many fun things we wanted to do with our girls, so many things we wanted to experience together. You just tear that page out completely, and then how do you rewrite the story?” asks her in the interview. “I’m learning how to take back control. It may not be the prettiest story I could have dreamed up, but there are bright spots,” said Heming Willis.

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