Bruce Willis daughter says he 'lights up' when she enters his room despite dementia

Tallulah Willis, daughter of ailing star Bruce Willis, penned an emotional essay recalling the difficult time before he was diagnosed with Aphasia and she misunderstood him.

Tallulah, who is Bruce’s daughter with his ex-wife Demi Moore, penned about the darkest time when she was under the impression that the actor was ignoring her after he had two girls with his new wife Emma Heming Willis.

However, The Sixth Sense star was behaving weird at the time because he had started showing symptoms of Aphasia, which later progressed to frontotemporal dementia.

Recalling the painful time before Bruce was diagnosed, Tallulah wrote in Vogue, “I’ve known that something was wrong for a long time. 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.”

“Later that unresponsiveness broadened, and I sometimes took it personally,” she added. “He had had two babies with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, and I thought he’d lost interest in me.”

“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,” she penned.

Tallulah went on to reveal that at the time when Bruce was silently struggling with his health scare, she too was suffering from an eating disorder.

“I admit that I have met Bruce’s decline in recent years with a share of avoidance and denial that I’m not proud of,” she shared. “The truth is that I was too sick myself to handle it.”

“For the last four years, I have suffered from anorexia nervosa, which I’ve been reluctant to talk about because, after getting sober at age 20, restricting food has felt like the last vice that I got to hold on to.”

She said when she was “wrapped up in [her] body dysmorphia” and posting about it on social media, the Pulp Fiction star, who also shares two more daughters with Demi, was “quietly struggling.”

“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,” Tallulah mentioned.

At her friend’s wedding in 2021, Tallulah realized her that her dad would not be able to walk her down the aisle at her nuptials and would never speak “about [her] in adulthood” at her big day.

“I left the dinner table, stepped outside, and wept in the bushes,” she penned. “And yet I remained focused on my body. By the spring of 2022, I weighed about 84 pounds. I was always freezing. I was calling mobile IV teams to come to my house, and I couldn’t walk in my Los Angeles neighbourhood because I was afraid of not having a place to sit down and catch my breath.”

However, after all the difficult time that Tallulah went through, she revealed that Bruce recognizes her whenever she enters the room. She said her actor father still knows who she is and “lights up when [she] walks into the room.”

“I keep flipping between the present and the past when I talk about Bruce: he is, he was, he is, he was,” she wrote. “That’s because I have hopes for my father that I’m so reluctant to let go of. I’ve always recognized elements of his personality in me, and I just know that we’d be such good friends if only there were more time.”