Bruce Willis

Bruce Willis lives in a second “safer” house away from his wife and children to be with their caregivers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, his wife told Diane Sawyer in an interview broadcast on Tuesday.

“It was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve had to take so far,” Emma Heming Willis told Sawyer. “But I knew it first, Bruce would like that for our daughters. He would want them to be in a home that was more adapted to their needs, not to their needs.”

Willis and Heming Willis share daughters Mabel, 13, and Evelyn, 11, while he and his ex -wife, actor Demi Moore, share daughters Rumer, 37, Scout, 34, and Tallulah, 31.

In 2022, Willis’s family, including Moore, announced that he lived with apasia, which affects the ability to communicate and withdraw from acting.

The following year, the family said Willis lived with dementia. In the ABC News special with Sawyer, Heming Willis gave an internal look to her husband’s experience with the disease, saying that she transferred him to a house of a “safer” floor to be able to be with his caregivers all the time. She said she visits him in the second house every morning for breakfast and every night.

“It’s a house full of love, warmth, care and laugh,” said Heming Willis.

Willis has frontotemporal dementia, which makes a person lose his words. Willis, 70, continues to walk and apparently unknown to his diagnosis, said his wife.

“Bruce has great health in general,” said Heming Willis. “It is only your brain that is failing. Language goes and we have learned to adapt. And we have a way of communicating with him, which is a different way.”

EVAN AGUTINI/INVISION/AP

Heming Willis said he began to notice a difference in Willis when he shut up and “melted a little” when the family met. She said she stopped wanting her two daughters to school, and then the stuttering of her childhood returned. Heming Willis said everything was “alarming and scary.”

When the doctors diagnosed Willis with frontotemporal dementia a few years ago and told Heming Willis that there was no cure, he was “panic.”

“I just remember listening to him and not heard anything else,” he said.

She shared that now struggles to remember what the actor was like before her diagnosis.

“It is also very difficult for me today to return in time to remember even the fun, because I am so caught today, what you see today and walk this trip with him today, that I cannot remember,” he said. “I have a hard time remember who it was.”

But she said that you still see old Willis moments.

“It’s his laugh, right? As he has such an abundant laugh,” he said. “And, you know, sometimes you will see that brightness in his eye, or that smile, and, you know, they transport me.”

Heming Willis wrote the book “The unexpected trip: find strength, hope and yourself on the path of care” about Willis’s care, and said he hopes to give a road map to other caregivers.