(CNN) — Bruce Willis’s daughter, Tallulah, has revealed her struggles coming to terms with her father’s diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and shared details about its impact on her family’s lives.
“I keep wandering 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 refuse to let go,” wrote the 29-year-old daughter of the “Die Hard” star and his ex-wife Demi Moore, in a lengthy first-person essay for Vogue magazine, published this Sunday. Wednesday.
Tallulah recalled the early signs of her father’s illness, which the family initially billed as aphasia, a condition that can make communication difficult. His family has since shared that the actor lives with FTD, which affects areas of the brain generally associated with personality, behavior and language, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Bruce and Tallulah Willis in a photo together in 2015. (Credit: Kevin Mazur/WireImage/Getty Images/FILE)
“I have known something was wrong for a long time,” he wrote. “It started with kind of a vague non-response, which the family chalked up to Hollywood hearing loss: ‘Speak up! “Die Hard” ruined daddy’s ears.’”
“Later, that lack of response was amplified, and sometimes I took it personally. (He) had had two babies with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, and I thought he had lost interest in me. Although this couldn’t have been further from the truth, my teenage brain was tortured with some faulty math: I’m not beautiful enough for my mother, I’m not interesting enough for my father.
Tallulah Willis is the youngest daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore. (Credit: Leon Bennett/WireImage/Getty Images/FILE)
Tallulah Willis also spoke candidly about her own health: her ADHD and borderline personality disorder diagnoses, and her battle with anorexia nervosa, recalling that in the spring of 2022 she weighed about 80 pounds and couldn’t walk around her neighborhood in in case there was no place to sit down to catch your breath.
“I admit that I have faced the decline of Bruce in recent years with a part of avoidance and denial that I am not proud of. The truth is, I was too sick to handle it myself,” she wrote.
“I had managed to put an epidural in my central channel of feelings for dad; the good feelings weren’t really there, the bad feelings weren’t really there. But I remember a moment when it hit me painfully: I was at a wedding in the summer of 2021 on Martha’s Vineyard, and the father of the bride gave a moving speech. I suddenly realized that I would never get to that moment, my dad talking about me in my adulthood at my wedding. It was devastating. I left the dining room table, went outside and cried in the bushes,” he recounted.
After spending time at a recovery center in Texas, Tallulah Willis says she felt “so much better” and now has “the tools to be present in all facets of my life, and especially my relationship with my dad.”
Whenever she visits her father now, she takes photos of everything to document their time together and says she has all of his voicemails saved on a hard drive.
“I’m like an archaeologist, looking for treasure in things I never used to pay much attention to,” he said. “I realize I’m trying to document, to create a record for the day that he’s not there to remember him and us.”
She added: “In the past I was very afraid of being destroyed by sadness, but I finally feel that I can show up and trust myself. I can savor that moment, hold my dad’s hand and feel how wonderful it is. I know that trials are coming, that this is the beginning of the pain, but all that stuff about loving yourself before you can love someone else, it’s real.”
