“Are you kidding?” Emma says when I ask her if Bruce would have been okay with that before he developed FTD. “No, it’s my husband. No. He knows what’
“Are you kidding?” Emma says when I ask her if Bruce would have been okay with that before he developed FTD. “No, it’s my husband. No. He knows what’s what. He makes the decisions. He’s the one.”
Besides Kraft, Golde, Bruce’s doctors, and the family, Emma kept everyone away, desperately trying to protect her very notable husband’s privacy—something she now recognizes might have been her own stigma around a disease she had never really thought about.
But when she was alone, Emma’s life was “derailed.” She had no idea what was going to happen next. She was trying to parent their youthful daughters, Mabel, now 13, and Evelyn, 11, while simultaneously keeping the house serene and tranquil for Bruce. Emma was doing everything herself: trying treatments, making appointments, grasping for any kind of problem Bruce’s symptoms could be attributed to that might have an answer. She wished he would be diagnosed with a benign brain tumor. It is the kind of hope one has only when things are well and truly fucked, but a possibility that might mean this could be reversed, and things could go back to how they were. Early on, Emma was also afraid to share what was happening with anyone—it felt like that would make it real.
“I was very angry, very upset, very sad,” Emma says. “It was really hard for me to just separate what I was pissed at and who I was pissed at. I just wasn’t in a good state of mind. And it wasn’t good for Bruce, it wasn’t good for our children, it wasn’t good for anyone—especially not me.”
In Golde, Emma found someone who understood the pressure of isolation—Golde’s (also alpha) husband had initially made her promise not to tell anyone about his dementia, which became increasingly personally taxing as well as arduous to hide when his behavior became more noticeably aberrant to friends. Golde told Emma that, from surviving that time, she learned “just because one person gets the diagnosis doesn’t mean both people have to die.”
Bruce would not be involved with his own coming-out process: He and Emma did not yet know this, but the part of his brain that controls self-awareness was deteriorating. Bruce will never understand what happened to his brain.
Photograph by Norman Jean Roy
In March 2022, after doctors recognized Bruce’s aphasia—a difficulty with communicating and processing language—his family put out a statement. “To Bruce’s amazing supporters, as a family we wanted to share that our beloved Bruce has been experiencing some health issues and has recently been diagnosed with aphasia, which is impacting his cognitive abilities,” read the post, signed by Emma, Moore, and their daughters. “As a result of this and with much consideration Bruce is stepping away from the career that has meant so much to him.”
People criticized the decision to have “let” Bruce continue making movies until that point, which he had done in those last few years with the aid of an earpiece feeding him dialogue. Filming had been Bruce’s decision, Emma says, and one unimpeded by any diagnosis. “When someone wants to work,” she asks, “how do you stop someone from working?”
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