BRUCE ALMIGHTY

When Emma Heming married one of the world's most famous movie stars, an alpha male with a wink to beat them all, she didn't imagine the fate that would ultimately befall either of them. Now, as Bruce Willis grapples with frontotemporal dementia, his wife and caregiver tells ANNA PEELE how she is helping others through the experience of the longest goodbye

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Emma Heming Willis did not yet know that her husband had frontotemporal dementia. The disease, known as FTD, affects the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, which control a person's language and behavior. How they perceive the world and exist within it. Their personality. These sections of Bruce Willis's brain—the sections that had made him an international movie star and, much more crucially for Emma, a protective partner and exuberant father who could find fun anywhere—were dying.

What Emma knew was that Bruce had changed. At first, she thought maybe it was just the kind of dwindling that happens in a long-term relationship. Eventually, she became alarmed. Emma remembers this mystery that was foisted upon her: "What is going on? This is not the person that I married. Something is just so off. And I just couldn't figure it out."

Emma, 49, is sitting in her friend Franne Golde's Beverly Hills backyard as she recounts these events. It's a hot July day two months before the release of her book, The Unexpected Journey, and Emma is impeccable in jeans, a striped Xirena shirt, and Oliver Peoples bifocals she's still getting used to—she tripped on Golde's front stairs. The former model has the kind of posture that allows her to appear erect even when she leans onto a pillow with her chin resting on her left hand, which bears a textured gold band—a gift from Bruce for their fifth anniversary—in place of her engagement and wedding rings. Golde keeps coming out to refill a pitcher of what she calls cranberry spritzer, a nonalcoholic secret recipe that appears to be cranberry juice and seltzer.