In February, Bruce Willis’ family officially confirmed that the Die Hard star has frontotemporal dementia.
It is a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease associated with behavioral and language problems caused by changes and damage in the brain. It had previously become known that the actor had to retire from his job due to so-called aphasia (speech finding disorders).
Now, Tallulah, his daughter with Demi Moore, hinted in an article for Vogue that his health had been deteriorating for some time. She told in detail how the first symptoms of dementia appeared.
It all started with a lack of attention
“It started with a kind of vague inattentiveness that the family traced back to the Hollywood hearing loss,” she wrote. “More often he would say, ‘Speak up! ‘Die Hard’ damaged father’s ears’. Later, this unresponsiveness widened, and sometimes I even took offense at him. Tallulah initially interpreted the lack of attention as a lack of interest in her, also because Willis had remarried and had children again (with Emma Heming Willis, editor’s note).
“While this couldn’t be further from the truth, my teenage brain plagued my teenage brain with some false thoughts: ‘I’m not beautiful enough for my mom, I’m not interesting enough for my dad,'” she said, while describing how She was struggling with anorexia and borderline personality disorder and was therefore unable to look at her father’s health changes with a realistic view.
“The truth is, I was too ill to deal with it myself,” she explained, later recalling the moment she realized the seriousness of her father’s illness. “I remember a moment when it hurt me: I was at a wedding… and the father of the bride gave a moving speech. I suddenly realized that I would never live to see that moment, that my father would be talking about me as an adult at my wedding. It was devastating.”
Later in the essay, Tallulah explained that while this is still just the “beginning of grief” for her family, given that her father’s health can change quickly and unpredictably, she is now determined to spend the remaining time with him to enjoy.
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