Bruce Willis’ daughter, Tallulah, has revealed her difficulties coming to terms with her father’s frontotemporal dementia (FTD) diagnosis and shared details about its impact on her family’s life.
“I keep flipping between the present and the past when I talk about Bruce: he is, he was, he is, he was. That’s because I have hopes for my father that I’m so reluctant to let go of,” the 29-
She recalled the first signs of her father’s illness, which the family initially announced was aphasia, a condition that can hinder communication. His family has since shared that
the actor is living with FTD, which affects areas of the brain generally associated with personality, behavior and language, according to the Mayo Clinic.
“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. He had had two babies with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, and I thought he’d lost interest in me.
Though this couldn’t have been further from the truth, my adolescent brain tortured itself with some faulty math: I’m not beautiful enough for my mother, I’m not interesting enough for my father.”
“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. The truth is that I was too sick myself to handle it,” she wrote.