Emma Heming Willis defends moving Bruce Willis to separate home: “Bruce has the best care 100 per cent of the time”
Bruce Willis‘ wife, Emma Heming Willis, has defended her decision to move the actor to a separate home for care reasons as he battles frontotemporal dementia.
Last month, Heming Willis sat down with Diane Sawyer in an ABC special for a broad-ranging conversation about her husband’s health, and also the realities of being married to someone suffering from dementia.
In the discussion, Heming Willis said of his current condition: “Bruce is still very mobile. Bruce is in really great health overall, you know. It’s just his brain that is failing him.” She also shared, “The language is going, and, you know, we’ve learned to adapt.”
Heming Willis also confirmed she had moved Willis, with whom she has breakfast and dinner every day, to a separate property where he receives round-the-clock care from professionals. She described this as “one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make”.
This decision attracted criticism online, but Heming Willis stands by her choice, telling Good Morning America it “was the safest and best decision, not just for Bruce, but also for our two young girls”.
She continued: “It’s really not up for a debate. Now I know that Bruce has the best care 100 per cent of the time. His needs are met 100 per cent of the time, as well as our two young daughters, so I’m not going to take a vote on that.’
Heming Willis stated she “knew it would” lead to criticism if she revealed the family’s living situation, which is why she chose to try to end the stigma. “I feel like caregivers are so judged, and it just goes to show that people sometimes just have an opinion versus really having the experience,” she added.
The former model then explained that “dementia plays out differently in every household” and stressed that no two cases are the same.
Heming Willis, who recently released her book The Unexpected Journey, also opened up about the difficulties of being a caregiver, revealing that “Bruce’s neurologist shared a statistic that sometimes caregivers die before their loved one”, which she described as a “wake-up call” to “get help”.
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