Weep not for Emma Willis.
What she has wrought is particularly ghoulish, even by Hollywood standards.
Ever since announcing that her husband, movie star Bruce Willis, was diagnosed with aphasia and, one year later, frontotemporal dementia, Emma has cornered the market on so-called ‘compassionate care’.
Truly, the question must be asked — not that ABC’s Diane Sawyer did so in her groveling hour-long primetime interview with Emma on Tuesday — just how compassionate is this spectacle, really?
It was galling to watch Emma, 47 years old to Bruce’s 70, climb the stairs in a home her husband’s work surely paid for, dressed like Meghan Markle in monochromatic quiet luxury, a no-makeup makeup look, to sit down for her close-up.
She was wearing glasses, perhaps to underscore her new seriousness. Yes, she was a model once, but now she is a writer and an activist.
Weep not for Emma Willis. What she has wrought is particularly ghoulish, even by Hollywood standards
Sawyer’s voice-over introduction: ‘This is Emma Willis, a lifelong self-described introvert, steeling herself to talk in front of cameras — something she never sought, and never planned.’
PLEASE.
The minute Emma signed her lucrative book deal for ‘The Unexpected Journey: Finding Strength, Hope and Yourself on the Caregiving Path’, she knew she’d be out on the promotional trail.
So please, Diane Sawyer: Stop. Stop insulting ABC’s dwindling audience.
After Diane introduces a clip reel of Bruce at his best, boldest, strongest and funniest, Emma lets the world in on her husband’s inexorable decline — but not before Diane shows some clips of a younger Bruce flirting with her.
It’s all so gross. So utterly distasteful, these two women sitting around and talking — really, it feels more like gossiping — about all the ways in which Bruce’s motor functions and memory are failing him.
About a one-time icon of American masculinity being brought to his knees by an incurable disease, which Sawyer tells us is ‘the black belt of dementias’.
But let’s talk more about Emma.
‘I was so panicked,’ she says of hearing her husband’s diagnosis. ‘I was free-falling.’
How did Bruce react, Sawyer wants to know.
‘I don’t think Bruce ever really connected the dots,’ Emma says.
How crass, vulgar and self-serving.
On Friday, Emma said that critics of hers don’t know what they’re talking about.
Well, unfortunately, I do. My mother has suffered with dementia for years, and it is a very small and select few who see her and know her condition.
We do not use her decline as the stuff of family text threads. When we take pictures of her, it’s for health and medical reasons, and there is zero chance those images would ever find their way to peripheral family and friends, let alone to social media.
Dementia, in whatever form, robs the sufferer of everything — but the cruelest cut is the loss of personal dignity.
My family do all we can to ensure that my mother has hers. It would be unthinkable, to any of us, to bleat out how hard her condition is for us, let alone marinate in self-pity.
So to see Emma, and Bruce’s grown daughters with his first wife Demi Moore, and Demi herself pose for photos with Bruce — whose eyes are vacant, who clearly doesn’t know what is going on — and splash them all over Instagram is disgusting.
It serves one purpose, to my mind: To make them all look like the most benevolent, generous, patient, loving people on the planet.
It’s all so gross. So utterly distasteful, these two women sitting around and talking – really, it feels more like gossiping – about all the ways in which Bruce’s motor functions and memory are failing himÂ
About a one-time icon of American masculinity being brought to his knees by an incurable disease, which Diane Sawyer tells us is ‘the black belt of dementias’ (pictured back in 2013)
As anyone with direct experience knows, it’s profoundly frustrating and difficult to spend a sustained amount of time with someone whose dementia has advanced.
It’s not helping the discourse for Emma or the rest of the Willis clan to pretend that this kind of caregiving is easy, let alone pretty and ‘Insta perfect’.
Or that the dementia patient ever knows peace, as those images of Bruce with his eyes closed, Emma nestled into his neck, would have us believe.
Not so.
When a patient with advanced dementia is calm, it’s usually because they’re heavily medicated.
Now: Emma is selling her book as a public service — as enlightenment on this form of dementia and how caregivers can best give said care.
A thin premise, indeed. All forms of dementia are hardly understood. All civilian caregivers suffer burnout.
The difference here is that Emma’s husband worked himself to the bone, even while sick, to make sure his entire family — Emma, their two children, and his three daughters with Demi — would be financially secure.
Not every family has a multimillion-dollar fortune to move their loved one into a private residence with round-the-clock, individualized care, as Emma has done.
There is zero reason for this book to exist, or for Emma’s media tour, or for Bruce and Demi’s daughter Scout to release her second album (who even knew there was a first?) on September 5, just days before her stepmother’s book publishes on September 9.
Back to this primetime interview, replete with once-private family photos.
‘Bruce is in really great health, overall,’ Emma says. ‘You know, it’s just his brain that is failing him’.
Diane: ‘But the language is —’
Emma: ‘Yeah, the language is going… It’s hard, but I’m grateful. I’m grateful that my husband is still very much here.’
I can only speak for myself and those closest to my mom, but trust me when I say we wish something else would take her, swiftly and painlessly, to end her suffering.
We don’t feel grateful that she is still ‘very much here’, because she is not.
Perhaps Emma has good reason to feel differently, even though Bruce has progressed so far in his illness.
After all, her book is already a bestseller on Amazon.
