Bruce Willis is living in a second home amid his battle with frontotemporal dementia, wife Emma Heming Willis revealed during Emma and Bruce Willis: The Unexpected Journey – A Diane Sawyer Special.
“It was one of the hardest decisions that I’ve had to make so far,” Heming Willis, 47, said in the ABC special that aired on Tuesday, August 26. “But I knew, first and foremost, Bruce would want that for our daughters. You know, he would want them to be in a home that was more tailored to their needs, not his needs.”
Their second home is a one story house where Bruce lives full-time with his care team, which is not far from the family’s first home. Heming Willis, who wed Willis in 2009, said she and their daughters — Mabel Ray Willis, 13, and Evelyn Penn Willis, 11 — spend “a lot” of time at the second home with Willis, including visits for breakfast and dinner. (Willis is also a dad to daughters Rumer Willis, 37, Scout LaRue Willis, 34, and Tallulah Belle Willis, 31, with ex-wife Demi Moore.)
The Die Hard actor’s family revealed he was retiring from acting after he was diagnosed with aphasia in March 2022. According to Mayo Clinic, aphasia is a language disorder that affects how a person communicates. It can impact their speech, the way they write and the way they understand both spoken and written language.
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Nearly one year later, Willis’ family confirmed his condition had progressed to frontotemporal dementia, also known as FTD. It’s an umbrella term for a group of brain diseases that affect the brain’s frontal and temporal lobes – which are areas that are associated with personality, behavior and language, according to Mayo Clinic.
Willis’ family has continued to share updates of his health journey with fans, but they gave the most intimate look inside Willis’ life now on the ABC special. Willis’ wife, Heming Willis opened up about when she started noticing the first signs of her husband’s cognitive health decline.
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“For someone who is very talkative and very engaged, he was just a little more quiet. And when the family would get together, he would kind of just melt a little bit,” Heming Willis said during a sit-down interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer. “It felt a little removed, very cold, not like Bruce, who was very warm and affectionate,” Heming Willis continued. “To go in the complete opposite of that was alarming and scary.”
Sawyer, 79, interviewed Dr. Bruce Miller for the special. While Dr. Miller does not treat Willis, he is an expert in FTD – which Sawyer said tends to strike early, as the mean age of when patients are diagnosed is 56 years old.
“This is really the unknown disease. People weren’t aware of it really until the 1990s. The research on this really has just begun,” Dr. Miller explained.
Heming Willis told Sawyer that many patients suffering from FTD often go misdiagnosed as bipolar or suffering from a midlife crisis and depression. It wasn’t until a brain scan that the Pulp Fiction actor was officially diagnosed with what Sawyer referred to as “the black belt” of dementias.
The Make Time Wellness founder was told that there was nothing to be done about Willis’s FTD diagnosis, that there was no cure and no hope.
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“To leave there with no … with nothing, just nothing, with a diagnosis I couldn’t pronounce. I didn’t understand what it was,” Heming Willis said. “I was so panicked. And I just remember hearing it and just not hearing anything else. It was like I was free falling.”
Her experience is what inspired to share her family’s journey in a new book, The Unexpected Journey: Finding Strength, Hope, and Yourself on the Caregiving Path, as a way to throw out a lifeline to loved ones and caregivers who are navigating similar journeys with FTD diagnoses.
