Yahoo Sports Bruce Willis' daughter writes devastating essay on dad's dementia: 'This is the beginning of grief'
Bruce Willis' daughter Tallulah Willis has opened up about her father's dementia diagnosis in a moving new essay.
In the 29-year-old's intimate piece, published in Vogue, she reflected on coming to terms with her father's health struggles as well as her own.
"I've known that something was wrong for a long time," Tallulah 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."
Kevin Mazur/WireImage Bruce Willis and his daughter Tallulah Willis
She then detailed her history with anorexia, her later diagnosis with Borderline Personality Disorder, and her sobriety journey, which began when she was 20.
Tallulah — whose mother is actress Demi Moore, Bruce's ex-wife — described how her own experience informed how she processed her dad's condition.
She had a particularly upsetting realization while attending a wedding in 2021, months before Bruce's family went public with his aphasia diagnosis (and retirement from Hollywood) in March 2022. "The bride's father made a moving speech. Suddenly I realized that I would never get that moment, my dad speaking about me in adulthood at my wedding. It was devastating," she wrote. "I left the dinner table, stepped outside, and wept in the bushes."
Tallulah said she now feels empowered to "show up and be relied upon" as she helps care for her 68-year-old father.
Instagram/buuski Tallulah Willis and her father, Bruce Willis
"Every time I go to my dad's house, I take tons of photos — of whatever I see, the state of things," she wrote. "I'm like an archaeologist, searching for treasure in stuff that I never used to pay much attention to. 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."
She continued, "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. That office has always been a kind of window into what he's most interested in at any given moment. Recently I found a scrap of paper there on which he had written, simply, 'Michael Jordan.' I wish I knew what he was thinking. (In any case, I took it!) The room is filled with the knickknacks he has collected: vintage toy cars, coins, rocks, objects made of brass. He likes things that feel heavy in the hand, that he can spin around in his fingers. There's always music playing."
Thankfully, "he still knows who I am and lights up when I enter the room," she added. "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."
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