Tallulah Willis shares a devastating, emotional essay about her dad’s dementia diagnosis

Though Bruce Willis‘ family has been public about his health struggles and dementia diagnosis for awhile now, his adult daughters with ex-wife, Demi Moore, have kept their feelings mostly private. In a new essay that will absolutely break your heart, Tallulah Willis opens up about her dad’s devastating diagnosis and gives us an intimate glimpse into the grief that goes along with it.

In March 2022, Bruce Willis, his wife Emma Hemming Willis, Moore, and all three of his adult daughters shared that he would be retiring from acting after receiving a diagnosis of aphasia. Aphasia affects a person’s ability to express and understand written and spoken language. In February of this year, the Willis family revealed that Bruce had been formally diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.

In the emotional essay penned for Vogue, Tallulah opens up about what it’s like to watch her dad struggle, and how it affects her as his daughter. (Willis also father to Mabel, 11, and Evelyn, 9, with wife Emma.)

“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.’” she wrote. “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.”

She acknowledges that she knows that was far from the truth, but her own insecurities and mental health struggles made it hard to see for a long time. She admits she was in denial about the decline of her dad’s health due to her own issues—including an eating disorder and an ADHD diagnosis.

Throughout all this, she wrote, “my dad was quietly struggling.”

“All kinds of cognitive testing was being conducted, but we didn’t have an acronym yet,” she says. “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.”

While attending a wedding in the summer of 2021, Tallulah says it “painfully” hit her that her dad’s health was, in fact, declining, after listening to the bride’s father deliver his 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 writes. “I left the dinner table, stepped outside, and wept in the bushes.”

Now that she’s been recovering from her eating disorder and is taking care of herself, she says she’s equipped to be present in her life and in her relationship with Bruce.

“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,” she explains.

Now when she visits her dad, she documents his home and his life by taking lots of photos and saving voicemails and other mementos to her 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 shares. “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.”

His dementia has not yet affected his mobility and she says he still remembers who she is—a differentiating factor between early frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. She says he “lights up” whenever he sees her.

She shares that it wasn’t easy growing up as the daughter of two very famous celebrities, but now that she’s older and in recovery, things have vastly improved. Especially because her oldest sister, Rumer, welcomed the family’s first niece and grandchild, Louetta, in April.

“There’s this little creature changing by the hour, and there’s this thing happening with my dad that can shift so quickly and unpredictably,” she concludes. “It feels like a unique and special time in my family, and I’m just so glad to be here for it.”