Bruce Willis’ daughter, Tallulah, has spoken out about her father’s early signs of dementia, before his family officially announced his diagnosis.
In an essay published by Vogue on 31 May, the 29-year-old reflected on the start of 2022, when she and her family announced that Bruce was suffering from aphasia, a form of brain damage which impairs language expression and comprehension. She recalled that in March, her family then revealed how his medical condition has progressed, as he’d been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD).
Talluah, who is the daughter of Bruce and his ex-wife Demi Moore, then pointed out one of her father’s early symptoms. which she said she noticed before his diagnosis.
“I’ve known that something was wrong for a long time,” she wrote. “It started out with a kind of vague unresponsiveness, which the family chalked up to Hollywood hearing loss: ‘Speak up!’ Die Hard messed with Dad’s ears. Later that unresponsiveness broadened, and I sometimes took it personally.”
As noted by the Alzheimer’s Society, many people who have dementia could also be “living with hearing loss”. However, if a person already suffers from hearing loss, “it can make diagnosing dementia more difficult”.
In her essay, Tallulah confessed how she felt like her father had “lost interest” in her when he had his two daughters, Mabel, 11, and Evelyn, eight, with his second wife, Emma Heming Willis. While she said that later realised that her fear wasn’t true, her younger self didn’t comprehend that.
“Though this couldn’t have been further from the truth, my adolescent brain tortured itself with some faulty maths: I’m not beautiful enough for my mother, I’m not interesting enough for my father,” she wrote.
She also confessed that she was struggling with her own health, as she suffers from an eating disorder, when Bruce’s medical condition was worsening.
“I admit that I have met Bruce’s decline in recent years with a share of avoidance and denial that I’m not proud of,” she explained. “The truth is that I was too sick myself to handle it. For the last four years, I have suffered from anorexia nervosa, which I’ve been reluctant to talk about because, after getting sober at age 20, restricting food has felt like the last vice that I got to hold on to.”
Tallulah went on to explain that when she was “wrapped up in [her] body dysmorphia” and posting about it on social media, her father was still “quietly struggling”.
“All kinds of cognitive testing was being conducted, but we didn’t have an acronym yet,” she wrote. “I had managed to give my central dad-feeling canal an epidural; the good feelings weren’t really there, the bad feelings weren’t really there.”
She expressed that when she went to a friend’s wedding in 2021, she came to the candid realisation that her father would never speak “about [her] in adulthood at [her] wedding. She also described how she was still struggling with her eating disorder at the time of this discovery.
“I left the dinner table, stepped outside, and wept in the bushes. And yet I remained focused on my body. By the spring of 2022, I weighed about 84 pounds,” she wrote. “I was always freezing. I was calling mobile IV teams to come to my house, and I couldn’t walk in my Los Angeles neighbourhood because I was afraid of not having a place to sit down and catch my breath.”
Later in the essay, she discussed how her relationship with her father has grown and strengthened. She also noted that she’s making the most of her time that she has with him.
“I can bring him an energy that’s bright and sunny, no matter where I’ve been. In the past I was so afraid of being destroyed by sadness, but finally I feel that I can show up and be relied upon,” Tallulah wrote. “I can savor that time, hold my dad’s hand, and feel that it’s wonderful. I know that trials are looming, that this is the beginning of grief, but that whole thing about loving yourself before you can love somebody else—it’s real.”
As she also acknowledged that Bruce still knows who she is and “lights up when [she] walks into the room”, she also confessed that their bond won’t grow in the way that she wants due to his health condition.
“I keep flipping between the present and the past when I talk about Bruce: he is, he was, he is, he was,” she wrote. “That’s because I have hopes for my father that I’m so reluctant to let go of. I’ve always recognized elements of his personality in me, and I just know that we’d be such good friends if only there were more time.”
In March, Willis’ family first announced his FTD diagnosis in a joint statement, which was signed by Heming Willis, Moore, and his five daughters. Along with Tallulah, Moore and Bruce share two daughters: Rumer, 34, and Scout, 31.
“Unfortunately, challenges with communication are just one symptom of the disease Bruce faces. While this is painful, it is a relief to finally have a clear diagnosis,” they wrote in the statement, shared with the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration. “Today there are no treatments for the disease, a reality that we hope can change in the years ahead. As Bruce’s condition advances, we hope that any media attention can be focused on shining a light on this disease that needs far more awareness and research.”
