Willis’s family announced at the time that the actor would retire from public life and stop working and starring in new projects. After the diagnosis, his wife, Emma Heming, spoke of the degenerative process of his capacity and the consequences of the disease and the frustration it causes him.
His daughter Tallulah, 29, is the one who has now spoken out regarding the situation of his family in an article published in the US version of Vogue . In this text, he has addressed how comments about his physique on social networks, media exposure and criticism of his appearance affected his mental health.
“[Bruce Willis] I had had two babies with my stepmother and I thought she had lost interest in me. My brain was tortured with some misconceptions like ‘I’m not beautiful enough for my father, I’m not interesting enough’. Nothing is further from reality, “she detailed in the letter and took the first silences due to the inability to talk about his father as something personal.
Speaking about her father’s illness, Tallulah has expressed regret for the way she dealt with it in the first instance, since she suffered from anorexia nervosa at the time, which made her depression worse. Added to this was the diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). “While I was wrapped up in my body dysmorphia, my dad was struggling in silence,” she opened up.
“I admit that I have dealt with Bruce’s decline in recent times through avoidance and denial, of which I am not proud. The truth is that I myself was too sick to bear it,” she adds in the letter.
She acknowledges that one of the most difficult moments occurred at a friend’s wedding, when the father of the bride gave a speech. “I suddenly realized that I would never get to that moment, my dad talking about me as an adult at my wedding. It was devastating. I left the dining room table, went outside and cried in the bushes,” Willis’s daughter pondered.
Willis has been emphatic that one of the differences between dementia and Alzheimer’s is that the former manifests itself with speech or neurological disturbances and the latter, with memory problems. “He still knows who I am and lights up when he walks into the room. (He can always know who I am, except for the occasional bad day),” she explains.
For Tallulah Willis explains that when she visits her parents’ house, she herself is in charge of collecting photos and memories together, as well as storing the audios of Bruce Willis on a hard drive.