Like the rest of the world, I learned Thursday that Bruce Willis — the man we all know from "Die Hard" and "Moonlighting" — has frontotemporal dementia. I caught my breath at the headline, but didn’t process the news until the quiet of night, as I was trying to fall asleep.
Bruce Willis has frontotemporal dementia. Just like my dad.
It is a big deal to me, because people don’t mention frontotemporal dementia very much. Only a small handful of people with dementia — just 2%, according to one estimate — have the frontotemporal kind, so at my monthly support group for caregivers of people with dementia, all the talk was Alzheimer’s, which makes up the vast majority of cases. The support group was helpful, but I still often felt alone.
