Bruce Willis’s wife, Emma Heming Willis, has said that she and her husband communicate in their “own language” following his diagnosis with frontotemporal dementia (FTD).
Heming Willis, 47, an actor and model, has published a book about her and Willis’s experiences with the illness, in an effort to raise awareness.
Willis’s family announced in 2022 that the Die Hard star, now 70, was stepping away from acting, having been diagnosed with aphasia, a disorder which impairs a person’s ability to comprehend or formulate language.
Speaking to The Times, Heming Willis said: “Bruce and I now have our own language, our own way to be with each other. It’s just about sitting with him, walking with him, listening to him as he tries to verbalise in his own language. Hearing him, validating him.”
“It’s hard,” she continued. “FTD is just an unkind disease – it constantly takes. Even when you think it can’t take any more, it takes a little more.”
Willis and Heming Willis share two daughters, Mabel, 13, and Evelyn, 11, while Willis also has three daughters – Rumer, Scout, and Tallulah – from his previous marriage to the actor Demi Moore.
In the book, titled The Unexpected Journey: Finding Strength, Hope and Yourself on the Caregiving Path, Heming Willis also writes about the decision for Willis to move into a separate house, down the street from their family home.
It allowed Willis to receive round-the-clock care, as an alternative to a care home, though his wife said that it was “one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make”.
“But among the sadness and discomfort, it was the right move – for him, for our girls, and for me,” she said. “Ultimately, I could get back to being his wife. And that’s such a gift.”
She revealed that the current living arrangement allows Willis a degree of independence, and that he is visited by friends every Friday for what she describes as a “dude hangout”.
“It’s made such a difference for more friends and family to have their own experience with him without it being my home, without me hovering,” she said, “or my anxiety of how to manage the guest and their expectations, and then have to see their reactions – their sadness at what is.”
