He’s gamely trying to join in, to keep up with what’s going on around him, but he doesn’t seem to know the words of the song that everyone’s singing.
The song is Happy Birthday, and on Monday, Demi Moore shared a video of her ex-husband Bruce Willis being celebrated on his 68th, blowing out two candles stuck in an enormous pie. It was captioned: “I love our family”.
In the clip, Bruce is surrounded by women – his current wife, his ex-wife and the five daughters they’ve had with him, respectively.
They famously all lived together in lockdown, but now, as the reality of Bruce’s frontotemporal dementia diagnosis becomes heartbreakingly apparent, they look more united than ever. Supporting Bruce. Supporting each other.
It’s not the ending anyone wanted for this much-loved actor’s story, and yet it’s also a strangely beautiful one.
What an unlucky, lucky man.
This family setup is, of course, unusual, but Bruce and Demi aren’t the first Hollywood stars to attempt to pull it off.
Forget the vagina candles and organic blankets hand knitted from alpaca eyelashes, the moment the world turned on Gwyneth Paltrow was when instead of saying she and Chris Martin were divorcing, she announced they were “consciously uncoupling”.
This, it turned out, was a supremely irritating psychobabble way of saying that they were going to stay friends and still spend time together with their children as a family.
Unlike Gwyneth, Demi and Bruce have never banged on about this, they haven’t tried to monetise the way they navigated their marriage ending, attract attention for it, or preach down to others about it.
Instead they’ve just quietly got on with achieving the nigh-on impossible – a good divorce. The benefits for everyone involved, especially at this difficult time, are clear to see.
“We’ve become like a tribe. It’s generated a lot of interest because everyone can understand resentment and envy in the break-up of a marriage, but they don’t understand how I can get along with my ex like that,” Bruce said back in 2009, nine years after the split.
He made it sound effortless, which logic would dictate probably isn’t the case, or hasn’t always been, at least.
Bruce married second wife Emma 14 years ago – they’ve now been together longer than Bruce and Demi were – and they have daughters age 10 and eight.
Integrating her into the “tribe” probably took some delicate doing, on all sides. But they’ve made it work, and then some.
Demi is no longer bound by her marriage vows, but here she is, in sickness, for worse, standing by Bruce’s side.
Watching the video you can feel the love in the room, and the pain behind the smiles. The road ahead will be far from easy, but at least none of them are travelling it alone.
