Tallulah Willis and her family initially dismissed the early signs of her dad Bruce Willis’ dementia diagnosis.
“I’ve known that something was wrong for a long time,” Tallulah, 29, began in an essay for Vogue published Wednesday.
“It started out with a kind of vague unresponsiveness, which the family chalked up to Hollywood hearing loss.”
She detailed that her family members used to tell Bruce, 68, to “speak up” because his hearing had been affected after acting in his “Die Hard” film series.
As time when on, her father’s unresponsiveness “broadened” and she mistakenly “took it personally.”
“He had had two babies with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, and I thought he’d lost interest in me,” she admitted.
Bruce shares daughters Tallulah, Rumer, 34, and Scout, 31, with ex-wife Demi Moore. He then married model Heming in 2009 and together they welcomed two daughters: Mabel, 11, and Evelyn, 9.
“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.”
Tallulah revealed that she avoided the signs of her father’s declining health and was in denial in a way that she was “not proud of.”
“The truth is that I was too sick myself to handle it,” she noted, revealing that she has suffered from anorexia nervosa for the last four years.
She added that she had been reluctant to discuss her eating disorder because restricting food felt like “the last vice” she could hold onto after getting sober at the age of 20. On top of that, she was admitted to a treatment facility for depression when she was 25 and was later diagnosed with ADHD.
“While I was wrapped up in my body dysmorphia, flaunting it on Instagram, my dad was quietly struggling,” she wrote. “All kinds of cognitive testing was being conducted, but we didn’t have an acronym yet. I had managed to give my central dad-feeling canal an epidural; the good feelings weren’t really there, the bad feelings weren’t really there.”
She recalled coming to the “devastating” realization that her father would never give a speech about her “in adulthood at [her] wedding.”
“I left the dinner table, stepped outside, and wept in the bushes. And yet I remained focused on my body. By the spring of 2022, I weighed about 84 pounds,” she wrote. “I was always freezing. I was calling mobile IV teams to come to my house, and I couldn’t walk in my Los Angeles neighborhood because I was afraid of not having a place to sit down and catch my breath.”
Tallulah discussed the process of her recovery because she is finally able to be present in her relationship with Bruce.
“I can bring him an energy that’s bright and sunny, no matter where I’ve been. In the past I was so afraid of being destroyed by sadness, but finally I feel that I can show up and be relied upon,” she said. “I can savor that time, hold my dad’s hand, and feel that it’s wonderful.
“I know that trials are looming, that this is the beginning of grief, but that whole thing about loving yourself before you can love somebody else — it’s real.”
These days, Tallulah is grateful for every moment she has left with her father.
“Every time I go to my dad’s house, I take tons of photos — of whatever I see, the state of things. I’m like an archaeologist, searching for treasure in stuff that I never used to pay much attention to,” she wrote.
“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 added that Bruce still knows who she is and “lights up” when she enters the room.
“There’s this little creature changing by the hour,” she said, referring to her sister Rumer Willis’ newborn baby. “And there’s this thing happening with my dad that can shift so quickly and unpredictably.
“It feels like a unique and special time in my family, and I’m just so glad to be here for it.”
The “Pulp Fiction” actor, who retired from acting in March 2022, was diagnosed with “cruel” frontotemporal dementia in February. Just the previous year, he had announced his battle with aphasia.
“While this is painful, it is a relief to finally have a clear diagnosis,” his family said in a lengthy statement on the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration website.
“FTD is a cruel disease that many of us have never heard of and can strike anyone. For people under 60, FTD is the most common form of dementia, and because getting the diagnosis can take years, FTD is likely much more prevalent than we know,” they continued.
There are no known treatments for the disease.
