Bruce Willis’ daughter shares heartbreaking details on her father’s health

nme.com:

Bruce Willis’ daughter Tallulah has written an emotional letter, recalling the first signs of her father’s declining health.Back in February, it was announced that the Die Hard star had frontotemporal dementia.

The condition is an uncommon type of dementia that causes problems with behaviour and language, caused by gradual changes and damage in the brain.

The news came just one year after he retired from acting, following an initial aphasia diagnosis.Now, in a new essay written for Vogue, his daughter Tallulah — whose mother is Demi Moore — has detailed that she knew her father’s health had been declining “for some time”, and shared intimate details on how her family became aware of his early signs of dementia.“My family announced in early 2022 that Bruce Willis was suffering from aphasia, a brain-mediated inability to speak or to understand speech, and we learned earlier this year that that symptom was a feature of frontotemporal dementia, a progressive neurological disorder that chips away at his cognition and behaviour day by day,” she said, beginning the letter. “But 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.”She added that she initially thought that his lack of attentiveness was due to him “losing interest in her”, particularly due to him remarrying and having two more children with his new partner, Emma Heming Willis.“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.