Emma Heming Willis recently reached a milestone birthday — but she almost didn’t celebrate.
“I really was looking forward to 50 because my 40s felt like a little bit of a doozy. And I was just ready to embrace my 50s,” she tells Hoda Kotb in the Aug. 5 episode of the “Making Space” Podcast.
Despite looking forward to entering a new decade, Heming Willis is navigating one of life’s hardest seasons as the caregiver for her husband Bruce Willis, 71, who is living with frontotemporal dementia.
“I have not really been in the celebratory feelings of late, and I was unsure if I really wanted to do anything.”
So, what changed her mind?
“I had a friend of mine who kept sort of pushing and saying, ‘You don’t want to miss out on your 50. You have to celebrate in some form or fashion,” she says. “I really sat with that and I thought, ‘You know what? I don’t want to look back and think, ‘Why didn’t I celebrate 50?’ It is something to celebrate.”
So she told her loved ones exactly how she wanted to celebrate: “I said, ‘I want to eat tacos and I want to have a margarita.’”
Her family and closest friends made sure she had just that at an intimate gathering at her home in June.
Heming Willis calls the night “really lovely and intimate.”
“On top of it, it was the Knicks final. About 98% of the people there were Knicks fans,” she adds. “It was a great celebration.”
Kotb calls out the difficult juxtaposition of feeling joy while carrying grief.
“I think what you did underscores something that so many people who are in the middle of a difficult time struggle with: How can I have this celebration while this is going on?” says Kotb. “There’s guilt that comes with it. There’s moments you want to do something. You say, ‘Oh, but I can’t. I can’t. There’s a million other things that I need to be doing for him.’ Did you wrestle with that?”
“I always wrestle with it. I think guilt is something that I am always carrying,” Emma responds. “But I’ve learned that it is really not helpful. I always go back to: What would my husband want for me? He would want me to have a big fun bash. He would want me to celebrate my life with my friends and family. That is what I always think about when guilt of any sort comes in front of me. And I’m really happy that I did.”
Heming Willis says hearing from other caregivers has taught her how important it is to still allow joy in, reminding her that moments of laughter and happiness don’t diminish her love for Bruce.
“Life still isn’t easy. It’s very hard. It’s very heavy. But I have learned to also allow those cracks of light to come in, to experience joy, experience laughter, without being guilty about it,” she says. “Our people want us to experience our lives to the fullest.”
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