Bruce Willis is living in a second, “safer” home away from his wife and kids to be with his caregivers 24/7, his wife told Diane Sawyer in an interview aired Tuesday.
“It was one of the hardest decisions that I’ve had to make so far,” Emma Heming Willis told Sawyer. “But I knew first and foremost, Bruce would want that for our daughters. He would want them to be in a home that was more tailored to their needs, not his needs.”
Willis and Heming Willis share daughters Mabel, 13, and Evelyn, 11, while he and his ex-wife, actor Demi Moore, share daughters Rumer, 37, Scout, 34, and Tallulah, 31.
In 2022, Willis’ family, including Moore, announced that he was living with aphasia, which affects one’s ability to communicate, and that he would retire from acting.
The next year, the family said Willis was living with dementia. In the ABC News special with Sawyer, Heming Willis gave an inside look at her husband’s experience with the disease, saying she moved him into a “safer” one-story home so he could be with his caregivers all the time. She said she visits him at the second home every morning for breakfast and every night.
“It is a house that is filled with love and warmth and care and laughter,” Heming Willis said.
Willis has frontotemporal dementia, which causes a person to lose their words. The 70-year-old Willis is still walking and seemingly unaware of his diagnosis, his wife said.
“Bruce is in really great health overall,” Heming Willis said. “It’s just his brain that is failing him. The language is going, and we’ve learned to adapt. And we have a way of communicating with him, which is just a different way.”
Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
Heming Willis said that she first started noticing a difference in Willis when he became quieter and would “melt a little bit” when the family got together. She said he stopped wanting to take their two daughters to school, and then his childhood stutter returned. Heming Willis said it was all “alarming and scary.”
When doctors diagnosed Willis with frontotemporal dementia a few years ago and told Heming Willis there was no cure, she was “panicked.”
“I just remember hearing it and just not hearing anything else,” she said.
She shared that she now struggles to remember what the actor was like before his diagnosis.
“It’s also even really hard for me today to go back in time to remember even the fun, because I’m so caught up in today, of what today looks like and walking this journey with him today, that I can’t remember,” she said. “I just have a really hard time remembering who he was.”
But she said she still sees moments of the old Willis.
“It’s his laugh, right? Like, he has such a hearty laugh,” she said. “And, you know, sometimes you’ll see that twinkle in his eye, or that smirk, and, you know, I just get transported.”
Heming Willis wrote the book “The Unexpected Journey: Finding Strength, Hope, and Yourself on the Caregiving Path” about caring for Willis, and she said she hopes to give other caregivers a roadmap.
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