Bruce Willis’ daughter, wife detail heartbreaking Father’s Day

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Rumer Willis is opening up on how her relationship with her dad Bruce Willis has changed following his dementia diagnosis.

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In a message shared on Father’s Day, Rumer reflected on their unbreakable bond together.

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“Today is hard,” Rumer wrote in a caption that was accompanied by photos of herself and her dad throughout the years. “I feel a deep ache in my chest to talk to you and tell you everything I’m doing and what’s going on in my life. To hug you and ask you about life and your stories and struggles and successes.”

She continued by adding that she wished she had asked him “more questions while you could still tell me about it all.”

“But I know you wouldn’t want me to be sad today so I’ll try to just be grateful reminding myself how lucky I am that you’re my dad and that you’re still with me and I can still hold you and hug you and kiss your cheek and rub your head (and) I can tell you stories,” she wrote.

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Rumer also spoke lovingly about being able to watch her dad’s eyes “light up” when he sees his granddaughter.

“I will be grateful for every moment I have with you,” she concluded. “I love you so much dad happy Father’s Day. Sending love to all those who are in the boat with me or have lost their fathers, to the single moms who are the dads too, to my future baby daddy ❤️.”

Bruce’s wife Emma Heming Willis also shared a Father’s Day message of her own in which she offered her support “to all the dads living with disability or disease, showing up in the ways they can and to the children who show up for them.”

“What Bruce teaches our girls goes far beyond words,” Emma wrote on Instagram. “Resilience, unconditional love, and the quiet strength in simply being present… Love deepens. It adapts. It stays, even when everything else changes. But to be fair to myself, these symbolic days stir up a lot.
I’m profoundly sad today. I wish, with every cell in my body, that things could be different for him and lighter for our family. As they say in our FTD community, ‘It is what it is.’ And while that might sound dismissive, to me, it’s not. It grounds me. It helps me return to the acceptance of what is and not fight this every step of the way like I used to.”

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After an acting career that stretched back more than 40 years, Willis’ family announced he was retiring following his diagnosis with aphasia in March 2022.

The following year, his loved ones revealed that he was suffering from a type of dementia known as frontotemporal dementia. 

“FTD is a cruel disease that many of us have never heard of and can strike anyone,” the Die Hard star’s family wrote in a statement on the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration website at the time.

Speaking at the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement Forum last month, Emma recounted how the future the two of them had dreamed of together “vanished” when her husband’s diagnosis was confirmed.

“On the day Bruce got his diagnosis, we left the doctor’s office with a pamphlet and a hollow goodbye. No plan, no guidance, no hope, just shock,” she said, according to PEOPLE.

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“The future we imagined simply vanished, and I was left trying to hold my family together, raise our two young daughters, and care for the man I love while navigating a disease I barely understood.”

Emma said she felt “lost, isolated and scared.”

“What I needed in that moment at that appointment wasn’t just medical information. I needed someone to look me in the eye and say, ‘This feels impossible right now, but you will find your footing. You will survive this and you will grow because of it,’” she told the audience.

In the wake of her husband’s illness, Emma has become a vocal advocate for raising awareness on dementia and families and caregivers struggling to cope with their new way of life.

Later this year she will release a new book, The Unexpected Journey, which she wrote to help families going through similar struggles.

“I really wrote the book that I wish someone had handed me the day we got our diagnosis with no hope, no direction … not much,” the 46-year-old former model shared on Instagram when she announced the book back in April. “Today, life looks different for me and our family.”

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