Tallulah Willis, daughter of the Die Hard actor, provided details about how she discovered that something was wrong with her father.
Tallulah Willis, one of Bruce Willis's daughters, revealed that the actor's family initially ignored the early signs of dementia that the Die Hard star had been showing before he was diagnosed.
“I've known something was wrong for a long time,” Tallulah, 29, confessed in an essay for Vogue published Wednesday. “It started with kind of a lack of response that the family put down to Hollywood hearing loss,” she added.
The actor's daughter explained that they believed that Bruce, 68, had hearing problems because of his work in action films. As time passed, her father's lack of response "got worse" and she mistakenly "took it personally." “I had had two babies with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, and I thought she had lost interest in me,” Tallulah said.
"Although this couldn't have been further from the truth, my teenage brain was tortured with some faulty math: I thought I'm not beautiful enough for my mother and I'm not interesting enough for my father," Bruce's daughter recalled. Willis
Tallulah revealed that she ignored the signs of her father's declining health and denied them in a way that she "wasn't proud of." “The truth is, I was too sick to handle it myself,” she noted, revealing that she has suffered from anorexia nervosa for the past four years. On top of that, she entered a treatment center for depression when he was 25 and was later diagnosed with ADHD.
“While she was wrapped up in my body dysmorphia, bragging about it on Instagram, my dad was struggling in silence. She was taking all kinds of cognitive tests, but we didn't have an acronym yet," she recalled. She then came to the "devastating" conclusion that her father would never give a speech about her "at her wedding." "I left the dinner table , I went outside and cried in the bushes. And yet I remained focused on my body," she added.
"I know trials are coming, that this is the beginning of pain, but all this loving yourself before you can love someone else is real," Tallulah added.
“Every time I go to my dad's house, I take tons of photos, of what I see, the state of things. I'm like an archaeologist, looking for treasure in things I never used to pay much attention to. I have all of his voicemails saved on a hard drive. I find that I am trying to document, to build a record for the day that he is not there," explained the daughter of Bruce Willis.
The Pulp Fiction actor, who retired from acting in March 2022, was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in February. Just the year before he had announced his battle with aphasia.
