Published: January 2, 2025
Bruce Willis and Wife Celebrate 17th Anniversary Amid Dementia Battle: ‘Do It All Over Again’
By Movieguide® Contributor
Bruce Willis and his wife Emma Heming Willis celebrated their seventeenth wedding anniversary over the weekend.
“17 years of us ❤️ ,” Emma wrote in the caption of a recent Instagram post.
“Anniversaries used to bring excitement — now, if I’m honest, they stir up all the feelings, leaving a heaviness in my heart and a pit in my stomach,” she continued. “I give myself 30 minutes to sit in the ‘why him, why us,’ to feel the anger and grief. Then I shake it off and return to what is. And what is… is unconditional love. I feel blessed to know it, and it’s because of him. I’d do it all over again and again in a heartbeat.”
In 2022, Emma and her family announced that Bruce “was diagnosed with aphasia, which affected his cognitive abilities, and was stepping away from acting. About a year later, his family shared that Willis’ disease had progressed to frontotemporal dementia. Heming Willis, 46, has acted as her husband’s caregiver for the past two years,” TODAY reported.
READ MORE: ‘A FAMILY DISEASE’: BRUCE WILLIS’ WIFE ON ACTOR’S DEMENTIA DIAGNOSIS
She told Town & Country that one of the first signs she tipped her off that something was wrong came when she noticed her husband beginning to stutter.
While Willis “has always had a stutter but he has been good at covering it up,” it got worse over the years.
“As his language started changing, it [seemed like it] was just a part of a stutter, it was just Bruce. Never in a million years would I think it would be a form of dementia for someone so young,” she explained.
“I say that FTD whispers, it doesn’t shout. It’s hard for me to say, ‘This is where Bruce ended, and this is where his disease started to take over,’” Emma added.
READ MORE: BRUCE WILLIS’ FAMILY SEES ‘GREAT LOSS [AND] GREAT BEAUTY’ AMID DEMENTIA BATTLE