Bruce Willis and his wife Emma Heming are celebrating their “sweet 16”.
On Wednesday, Heming celebrated the couple’s 16-year anniversary by sharing a photo of herself kissing Willis’s cheek on her Instagram page, writing in the caption, “16 years with this special man. My love and adoration for him only grows.”
In February, Willis’s family – including Heming, ex-wife Demi Moore and his daughters – announced that the actor has been diagnosed with a form of dementia called frontotemporal dementia, or FTD for short.
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Heming also posted a vulnerable message to her Instagram this week about how hard it can be to celebrate such a relationship milestone while dealing with the Die Hard actor’s health issues, sharing in the video that she “was able to have a good cry” with a close friend.
Watch the video above.
“It is really important to be able to have someone that you can trust with your feelings instead of just bottling them up and putting your best foot forward and just kind of soldiering through stuff, which I have a tendency to do,” Heming said in the video.
The couple wed in 2009 and share two daughters together, Mabel and Evelyn.
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Heming, who has been open about her journey as Willis’s primary caretaker on her social media ever since, said in her video this week that “holidays are hard, anniversaries are hard.”
She added that “building a community and connection” has helped her get through it this year. “That has been my lifeline and I just want to thank you for that,” she said.
Heming wrote in the caption to her Instagram video about receiving “countless messages of love and support because Bruce is so beloved,” and that these messages help her feel “less alone.”
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“I wish I could answer all the messages because they are deep, raw and poetic but please know that I appreciate them so very much,” she wrote. “I am grateful to you.”
Willis’ family – including Heming, Moore and his five daughters – have regularly given updates on his condition.
Being open about Bruce’s progress is “important,” Tallulah said earlier this year, adding that her family’s goal is to “spread awareness about FTD.”
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“If we can take something that we’re struggling with as a family, individually, to help other people, to turn it around, to make something beautiful about it – that’s really special for us,” she said.
According to the Mayo Clinic, FTD is an “umbrella term for a group of brain disorders that primarily affect the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. These areas of the brain are generally associated with personality, behaviour and language.”