Emma Heming Willis recently came out about the painful moment she realised anything was amiss with her husband, Bruce Willis. In a recent interview with NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas, published on Wednesday, October 29, the 47-year-old model commented on the first sign that pointed to the actor’s disease long before his diagnosis. “I think for me what I noticed was that his stutter started to come back,” she said.
“Bruce had a severe stutter when he was a child that he held onto, actually, his life, but was able to kind of get a handle on it, I think, in his adult years. Then I started seeing that it started coming back. Never in my wildest dreams would I think that was now becoming a symptom of FTD.”
Bruce was struck down with aphasia in 2022, which is a disorder that impairs communication. The next year, his family discovered that his illness had worsened to frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a rare degenerative disorder affecting speech, behaviour, and cognition. After Vargas provided a disturbing statistic concerning carers’ health—and how they frequently die before the person they’re caring for—Heming Willis explained how she feels about being in this predicament.
She furthermore added to her plight, “Caregiving can be really harmful to your health. I didn’t know that, and I was grateful, yet alarmed, that his neurologist shared that with me, and that was a call for me to start taking care of myself. Not just for Bruce, but for our two young daughters.”
