Bruce Willis, who still recognizes his daughter Tallulah, despite the illness

First a diagnosis of aphasia in September 2022. Subsequently, as the conditions worsened, the official diagnosis: frontotemporal dementia. As many know by now, in February 2023 actor Bruce Willis was diagnosed with a particular form of dementia, identified following the speech and memory problems that had forced him to abandon his work on the set. A difficult and painful journey that has been told on social media by various members of the extended family of the famous 68-year-old actor.

The same family that, in the beginning, however, had “refused” to perceive with concern certain very first signs of dementia that Bruce Willis was beginning to show. Including her eldest daughter Tallulah, 29, as she recounted in hers memoir published in Vogue: “I’ve known for a long time that something was wrong,” wrote Tallulah. “It all started with a sort of vague insensitivity to things, which our family attributed to hearing loss.”

In her story, Tallulah – born of Bruce’s marriage to Demi Moore – explains, in detail, that various family members urged Bruce to “talk”, because they were convinced that his problems were due to impaired hearing on the sets of the saga Die Hard.
Over time, the silence and lack of response from her father “expanded” and she mistakenly took it personally: “He had had two children with Emma Heming Willis, I thought he had lost interest in me,” he admitted .

Bruce, who has ex-wife Demi Moore Tallulah with Rumer, 34, and Scout, 31, married model Heming in 2009 and together they welcome two daughters: Mabel, 11, and Evelyn, 9. “Even though all of this was vastly away from the truth, my teenage brain hurt itself by giving in to misconceptions: I’m not beautiful enough for my mother, I’m not interesting enough for my father.” Tallulah then revealed that she did not want to accept the signs of her father’s declining health and that he denied the evidence of her in a way that she is not at all proud of. “The truth is, I was too sick to handle all of that,” she said, revealing that she’s been suffering from anorexia nervosa for the past four years.

What’s more, she didn’t want to talk about her eating disorder because limiting food seemed like “the last vice” she could hold onto after she stopped drinking alcohol at age 20. “While I was engrossed in my body dysmorphia, flaunting it on Instagram, my dad was silently waging his own battle with the disease,” she wrote.

He then recalled when, after the various cognitive tests, she came to the “devastating” realization that her father would never give a speech about her when she got married. “I left the dining table, went out and cried in the bushes. Yet I stayed focused on my body. In the spring of 2022, I weighed about 38 kilos,” she confided. For Tallulah her recovery has coincided with being able to be present in her relationship with Dad Bruce. She who today is profoundly rich, despite her illness.

“I am able to bring him light and energy no matter where I have been. In the past, I was so afraid of being destroyed by sadness, but I finally feel that I can show up and be trusted,” she said. “I can savor those moments, hold my father’s hand and feel that he is wonderful. I know more trials loom, that this is the beginning of the pain, but learning to love yourself before you can love someone else it’s real”. Tallulah knows she should be grateful today for every moment she can still share with her father.

“Every time I go to see him, I take a lot of pictures, of everything I see, of the state of things. I’m like an archaeologist, looking for treasure in things I’ve never paid much attention to,” she wrote. “I have all of his voicemails saved on a hard drive. I’m trying to document, to build a document for the day when he won’t be there to remind me of him and us.” Tallulah added that Bruce has not completely lost his memory, he still recognizes her and his face “lights up” when she enters the room.

To the actor of pulp Fiction, who retired from acting in March 2022, was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia last February. Just the previous year she had announced her battle with aphasia.

“Even though this is painful, it’s a relief to finally have a clear diagnosis,” his family said in a lengthy statement on the UC’s website.Association for frontotemporal degeneration. “Frontotemporal dementia is a cruel disease that many of us have never heard of and that can affect anyone. In people under 60, it’s the most common form of dementia and because getting diagnosed can take years, it’s probably far more common than we know.”

Willis’ illness initially manifested itself in aphasia and emotional control difficulties, without the actor himself realizing it. A particular form of dementia, this, for three reasons: it can arise in relatively young individuals, between 50 and 60 years of age; it has little initial impact on memory and creates instead difficulties with language and behavior management; produces the loss of a special group of neurons, called von Economo (which in nature we share with monkeys, whales, elephants), crucial for social behavior and the sense of self.

If the disease follows the classic course, Willis could experience one over time slow mental disconnection and progressive loss of judgment, emotional control and understanding of what is happening around him and why. This could be compounded by a deterioration in the management of bodily functions and general health. There are no known treatments for this disease.