Bruce Willis turns 69 this Tuesday and social networks, as they did last year, have gone out of their way to send him encouragement and messages full of affection. The acclaimed Hollywood actor has been away from film sets for years after he was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in 2022. This type of dementia is caused by a group of brain disorders that affect the frontal and temporal lobes and cause alterations in thinking and behavior.
This serious illness was diagnosed after verifying that he suffered from aphasia, a disorder that mainly affects language and leads to other cognitive diseases. Due to his delicate state of health, the interpreter appears rarely on social networks. In fact, the last public image of him is from last February.
His ex-wife Demi Moore, whom he follows, published a gallery of images from his daughter Tallulah Willis' 30th birthday on her official Instagram account. In them, a deteriorated but smiling Bruce Willis appeared, always in the arms of one of his daughters: the aforementioned birthday girl, Scout or Rumer Willis.
The family has united more than ever in these difficult times, since according to international media the protagonist of titles such as Die Hard is "unrecognizable" and on his worst days he no longer recognizes his loved ones. "No one knows how much time he has left," a person close to him told US Weekley magazine at the beginning of the year.
The actor's frontotemporal dementia is advancing at an alarming speed and that is why his relatives seek to "spend as much time as possible with him," according to the same source told the American newspaper.
So much emphasis has been placed in the media on Willis' alarming state of health that both Moore and his current wife, Emma Heming, have come to the fore to prevent this disease from being stigmatized. During her intervention in January on Andy Cohen's show, the actress wanted to address those people with family members who suffer from dementia.
Despite recognizing that the most important thing is to find the sick person where they are and let go of expectations and memories, Moore assured that love is still present: "When you let go of the person they were, or the person that you would like them to be, then you can live in the present and enjoy that love that is present, that they give you because of how they are," he acknowledged.
For her part, Emma Heming wanted to correct the misconceptions that exist around neurodegenerative diseases like the one her husband suffers from and stated at the beginning of March on social networks that "we must stop scaring people by making them think that once they receive a diagnosis of some type of neurocognitive disease, it's over." In her experience, Heming recognizes that deep pain and love, sadness and connection, trauma and resilience, can be felt at the same time.
