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Emma Heming Willis is sharing new details surrounding her husband, Bruce Willis’ frontotemporal dementia diagnosis.
During Wednesday’s episode of the “Conversations with Cam” podcast, the 47-year-old opened up about a condition of FTD that affects a person’s ability to recognize their own illness.
“I think they think this is their normal, and it’s not for everybody,” she said. “There’s this neurological condition that sort of comes with FTD and other types of dementia as well, called anosognosia, where your brain can’t identify what is happening to it,” Heming Willis said. “So where people think this might be denial, they don’t want to go to the doctor, like, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’ Actually, this is the anosognosia that comes into play. It’s not denial, it’s just that their brain is changing. This is a part of the disease.”
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Emma Heming Willis says Bruce doesn’t fully understand his FTD diagnosis due to a condition called anosognosia. (Getty Images)
“I think that’s like the blessing and the curse of this, is that [Bruce] never connected the dots that he had this disease, and I’m really happy that he doesn’t know about it,” she added.
Emma said Bruce is “still very much present in his body” and explained that his family has “adapted” with him.
“He’s still very much present in his body,” she said. “His disease has, these diseases are for the most part, usually a slow progression. So we have progressed along with him. We have adapted along with him. So when someone says to me, ‘Does Bruce still know who you are?’ Yes, he does. Because he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, he has FTD. So we have a way, he has a way of connecting with me, our children that might not be the same as you would connect with your loved one, but it’s still very beautiful. It’s still very meaningful. It’s just different.”
In March 2022, it was announced that Willis would be “stepping away” from his acting career due to an aphasia diagnosis. It was later announced that he had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, also known as FTD.
FTD is “the result of damage to neurons in the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain,” according to the National Institute on Aging. “Many possible symptoms can result, including unusual behaviors, emotional problems, trouble communicating, difficulty with work, or difficulty with walking.”
Emma Heming Willis recently wrote a deeply personal essay on her website about navigating the holidays as her husband battles dementia. (Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)
Last year, during the ABC special “Emma & Bruce Willis: The Unexpected Journey,” Emma sat down with Diane Sawyer to detail Bruce’s last few years since he was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.
Emma told Sawyer that remembering Bruce’s initial diagnosis has been hard for her.
“It’s really gray for me where Bruce’s disease started to come in. He always loved taking the girls to school and then those school runs just started to not happen as much, and I thought that is so weird,” she said. Emma wouldn’t say anything to her husband and opted to “just step in and do it” instead.
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The actor’s wife first noticed signs of his health decline long before his diagnosis. Emma noticed the “alarming” warning signs when Bruce’s “warm” personality began to change, and he started skipping family events.
“For someone who is very talkative and very engaged, he was just a little more quiet. When the family would get together, he would kind of just melt a little bit,” she told Sawyer.
“It felt a little removed, very cold, not like Bruce, who was very warm and affectionate,” she continued. “To [go] the complete opposite of that was alarming and scary.”
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Emma shared that in the early stages of Bruce’s disease, she “didn’t understand what was happening” and wondered how she could “remain in a marriage that doesn’t feel like what we had. It doesn’t feel like a marriage anymore.”
Bruce first went public with his diagnosis in 2022. (Larry Busacca/VF14/WireImage/Getty Images)
She said she had those conversations with him, asking him, “Are you OK?” and he dismissed it. “It just got very bumpy and very confusing,” Emma told Sawyer.
When Sawyer asked if there are days when she sees him as he used to be, she said, “We get moments. It’s his laugh, right? Like, he has such, like, a hearty laugh. And, you know, sometimes you’ll see that twinkle in his eye, or that smirk, and, you know, I just get, like, transported. And it’s just hard to see, because as quickly as those moments appear, then it goes. It’s hard. But I’m grateful. I’m grateful that my husband is still very much here.”