Hollywood actor Bruce Willis battles with dementia, struggles to communicate
Close friend Glenn Gordon Caron shared an update on the actors health
‘Moonlighting’ creator Glenn Gordon Caron has commented on Bruce Willis’ condition since his frontotemporal dementia (FTD) diagnosis earlier this year.
The 69-year-old spoke to the New York Post about how he tries to visit the ‘Die Hard’ actor every month, reports ‘People’ magazine.
“I’m not always quite that good but I try and I do talk to him and his wife (Emma Heming Willis) and I have a casual relationship with his three older children,” Caron told the outlet. “I have tried very hard to stay in his life. The thing that makes (his disease) so mind-blowing is [that] if you’ve ever spent time with Bruce Willis, there is no one who had any more joie de vivre (joy of living) than he.
“He loved life and … just adored waking up every morning and trying to live life to its fullest," Caron added.
He also shared that FTD has made Bruce, 68, unable to communicate, explaining that it's as if “he now sees life through a screen door”. As per ‘People’, he said that Bruce does still recognise him when he visits.
“My sense is the first one to three minutes he knows who I am,. He’s not totally verbal; he used to be a voracious reader -- he didn’t want anyone to know that -- and he’s not reading now. All those language skills are no longer available to him, and yet he’s still Bruce.
“When you’re with him you know that he’s Bruce and you’re grateful that he’s there, but the joie de vivre is gone,” he noted. Last month, Emma appeared on the ‘Today Show’, and shared that she’s not sure if her husband is aware of his health condition.
“What I’m learning is that dementia is hard. It’s hard on the person diagnosed. It’s also hard on the family. And that is no different for Bruce, or myself, or our girls. When they say that this is a family disease, it really is," she had said.
FTD is an all-encompassing term for a group of brain disorders that threatens, as the name implies, the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. This means that parts of these lobes atrophy. The shrinking of these areas can cause speech issues, emotional problems and changes in personality. Other symptoms can include loss of motor skills including problems walking, swallowing or muscle spasms.