In the moonlight creator Glenn Gordon Caron comments on Bruce Willis’ condition since his diagnosis of Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) earlier this year.
On Tuesday, the 69-year-old spoke with New York Post about how he tries to visit die Hard actor every month.
“I’m not always that good, but I try and talk to him and his wife [Emma Heming Willis] and I have a casual relationship with his three older children,” Caron told the newspaper. “I tried very hard to stay in his life.”
“What he does [his disease] so stunning [that] if you’ve ever spent time with bruce willis, there’s no one who is more the joy of living [joy of living] but he – continued the director. “He loved life and … he just loved waking up every morning and trying to live life to the fullest.”
Caron added that FTD had left Bruce, 68, unable to communicate, explaining that it was like he was “seeing life through a screen door now”. However, he said Bruce still recognizes him when he visits.
“My feeling is that he knows who I am for the first to three minutes,” he said. “He’s not entirely verbal; he used to be a voracious reader—he didn’t want anyone to know—and now he doesn’t read. All those language skills are no longer available to him, and yet he’s still Bruce.”
“When you’re with him you know he’s Bruce and you’re grateful he’s there,” he noted, “but the joy of living went.”
Bruce Willis.
ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty
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Last month Emma appeared on Today show and shared that she is not sure if her husband is aware of his medical condition.
“It’s hard to know,” the 45-year-old founder of Make Time Wellness, along with Susan Dickinson, head of the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration (AFTD), said on the show.
“What I’m learning is that dementia is hard,” Emma said. “It’s hard on the person diagnosed. It’s also hard on the family. And it’s no different for Bruce, for me, for our girls. When they say it’s a family disease, it’s real.”
Frontotemporal dementia is a comprehensive term for a group of brain disorders that threaten, as the name suggests, the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. This means that parts of these lobes atrophy.
Shrinkage in these areas can cause speech problems, emotional problems, and personality changes. Other symptoms may include loss of motor skills including trouble walking, swallowing, or muscle spasms.
Because the disease affects the frontal lobe — which controls self-perception — any understanding that they’ve changed is often the first thing those diagnosed with FTD lose, Dickinson said on Today. “Other people hold it in for a long time,” she explained. – We really don’t know.
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Bruce Willis and Emma Heming Willis.
Jamie McCarthy/Getty
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In fact, a lot of medical professionals and researchers are still learning about FTD. “Most doctors are not aware of it, so it can take almost 4 years for people to get a diagnosis on average,” Dickinson said. Along the way, they approve of “many misdiagnoses” including “depression, bipolar, Alzheimer’s or even someone with one of the movement disorders” like “Parkinson’s or ALS.”
That seemed to happen to Bruce. In March 2022, his family publicly revealed for the first time that he was retiring from acting after being diagnosed with aphasia, a language disorder that affects a person’s ability to communicate. But in February, Emma said his condition had worsened and he had frontotemporal dementia.
The symptoms of FTD get worse over time. Patients usually start to notice symptoms between the ages of 40 and 65, but it can affect younger people as well. It is the most common form of dementia in people under the age of 60.
Coming to terms with Bruce’s diagnosis was both “a blessing and a curse,” Emma said at the time. On the one hand, it was useful to “somehow finally understand what is happening”, she could be “in accepting what is”. But, as she noted, “that doesn’t make it any less painful.”
“Just being in acceptance, and just being aware of what’s going on with Bruce, just makes it a little bit easier,” she said.
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Source: HIS Education