Emma Heming Willis is marking her 17th anniversary with husband Bruce Willis with a tinge of sadness amid the actor’s ongoing battle with dementia.
Over the weekend, the 46-year-old former model celebrated the date she and Bruce started dating by sharing a post on Instagram that showed the pair on vacation in Turks and Caicos as the sun set behind them.
“17 years of us ❤️,” the mother-of-two wrote lovingly, before her message turned more somber.
“Anniversaries used to bring excitement,” Emma continued. “Now, if I’m honest, they stir up all the feelings, leaving a heaviness in my heart and a pit in my stomach.”
Emma, who married Bruce in 2009, said she allows herself some space to grieve her husband’s illness and how it has affected their lives, but said that she only allows a short block of time to question the cruelness of the disease.
“I give myself 30 minutes to sit in the ‘why him, why us,’ to feel the anger and grief. Then I shake it off and return to what is. And what is… is unconditional love. I feel blessed to know it, and it’s because of him. I’d do it all over again and again in a heartbeat 💞.”
The couple began dating after Bruce’s first marriage to actress Demi Moore ended in divorce in 2000. The two were married in Turks and Caicos on March 21, 2009, and share two daughters: Evelyn, 10, and Mabel, 12.
The Die Hard star also shares daughters Rumer, 36, Scout, 33, and Tallulah, 30, with Moore, to whom he was married to for 13 years.
Emma’s emotional social media post generated over 90,000 likes, with Bruce’s daughter Tallulah commenting, “I love you so much. Both of you.”
Bruce stepped away from acting in March 2022 after his family revealed he was suffering from aphasia — a neurological affliction that leaves a person unable to communicate.
But his condition worsened and last year his family confirmed that the father of five is suffering from frontotemporal dementia.
“FTD is a cruel disease that many of us have never heard of and can strike anyone,” the Moonlighting star’s loved ones wrote in a statement on the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration website.
Earlier this year, Emma said that following the horrific diagnosis, Bruce, 69, and his family have embarked on a “new chapter.”
“There is grief and sadness. There’s all of that. But you start a new chapter,” she said, adding that her family’s life is now filled “with love, it’s filled with connection, it’s filled with joy, it’s filled with happiness.”
Emma, who the wake of Bruce’s diagnosis has become a vocal advocate for families dealing with dementia, also took aim at rumours that “there is no more joy in my husband.”
In a video shared to her Instagram earlier this year, Emma spoke out about being “triggered” after she “just got clickbaited” by a headline purportedly addressing Bruce’s health.
“The headline basically says there is no more joy in my husband. Now, I can just tell you, that is far from the truth,” Emma said. “I need society – and whoever’s writing these stupid headlines – to stop scaring people. Stop scaring people to think that once they get a diagnosis of some kind of neurocognitive disease that that’s it. ‘It’s over. Let’s pack it up. Nothing else to see here. We’re done.’ No.”
In the caption of her post, Emma elaborated on what it’s been like seeing “headline after headline and blurbs of misinformation.”
“My experience is that two things can be true and exist at the same time. Grief and deep love. Sadness and deep connection. Trauma and resilience. I had to get out of my own way to get here but once I arrived, life really started to come together with meaning and I had a true sense of purpose. There is so much beauty and soulfulness in this story,” she wrote.
In a follow-up video, Emma asked media outlets to stop painting dementia as “dark and gloomy.”
“I think they need to show all sides of it,” she said. “Not just focus on the dark cloud of it, because dementia is so much more than that.”