Tallulah Willis is opening up about the symptoms that she and other family members initially missed in Bruce Willis, before his diagnoses with dementia and aphasia. In an emotional essay, she wrote:
“I’ve known that something was wrong for a long time. 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.”
Since Willis’ official diagnosis, he has been declining fairly rapidly, although Talullah says, “he still knows who I am and lights up when I enter the room.” She went onto describe how she now finds herself, “flipping between the present and the past when I talk about Bruce: he is, he was, he is, he was.”
“I’m like an archaeologist, searching for treasure in stuff that I never used to pay much attention to,” Tallulah continued. “I have every voicemail from him saved on a hard drive. I find that I’m trying to document, to build a record for the day when he isn’t there to remind me of him and of us. These days, my dad can be reliably found on the first floor of the house, somewhere in the big open plan of the kitchen-dining-living room, or in his office. Thankfully, dementia has not affected his mobility,” she wrote.
Despite her tenacity, Tallulah states that she has, “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. He was cool and charming and slick and stylish and sweet and a little wacky — and I embrace all that. Those are the genes I inherited from him.”
Sources:
Tallulah Willis Says Dad Bruce Still Recognizes Her amid His Dementia (people.com)
