After the iconic Bruce Willis was diagnosed with the neurological disorder, aphasia, in March 2022, his condition worsened. Earlier this year, his family revealed that the actor’s condition has progressed into dementia. Of course, this was tough news to take in, both for his close ones and his fans, who fell in love with him in Moonlighting.
Bruce Willis’ daughter, Tallulah Willis, recently opened up about how her father’s diagnosis affected her. She stated that she had an intuition about something being wrong way before the diagnosis and Bruce Willis’ unresponsive behavior was one of the reasons why. In fact, at times she took her father’s unresponsiveness personally and believed she was not good enough for him. It all made sense when he was finally diagnosed. To make things worse for Tallulah Willis, her fiancé ended things with her, just months into the diagnosis.
Tallulah Willis’ Fiancé Broke Up with Her Months after Bruce Willis’ Diagnosis
Tallulah Willis wrote a heartfelt and heart-wrenching, essay for Vogue. In the write-up, Willis opened about up a few things, including her father’s diagnosis. She even recalled how her boyfriend, who was her fiancé by then, broke up with her just three months after Bruce Willis was diagnosed.
The Whole Ten Yards actress was engaged to Dillon Buss, who called off the engagement in June 2022. As we all know, Willis was diagnosed with aphasia in March 2022. Dealing with back-to-back bad news must not have been easy for Tallulah. Before the breakup, she was also struggling with body dysmorphia. After her split with Buss, her family stepped in to take care of their daughter. She was sent to Driftwood Recovery and she was given therapy, all of which made her feel much, much better in a few months.
“In fact what happened was that in June of last year, my boyfriend, who was by then my fiancé, dumped me, and my family stepped in as they had done before and sent me to Driftwood Recovery, in Texas. I was introduced to a variety of therapies, my medication was retooled, and I was given a new diagnosis: borderline personality disorder, an illness that impairs the ability to regulate emotions and find stability in relationships. By the time I left Texas, in October, I felt a lot better.”
This led her to understand that being in harmony with her family was much more important to her than being in harmony with her body. She didn’t want to worry her parents and her sisters and now, as she is on the road to recovery, she feels much better.
Tallulah Willis Thought Bruce Willis Wasn’t Interested in Her
Before Willis’ heartbreaking diagnosis, his daughter knew something was wrong. In the essay, she recalled how the Die Hard actor was unresponsive toward her, which she mistook as his disinterest. She started to believe that since he had two more daughters with Emma Heming Willis, her stepmother, he had lost interest in her.
“But 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…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. 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 even recalled the time when she attended a wedding and saw the father of the bride give a moving speech. The realization soon hit her that she won’t be able to have that for herself. This caused her to leave the dinner table and cry in the bushes outside. We cannot possibly imagine how hard it must be for a daughter to see her father in such a condition.
Source: Vogue
