NEED TO KNOW
- Maria Menounos got candid on her Heal Squad podcast about what it was like to watch her late mother’s health decline amid her brain cancer diagnosis
- She noted that she “didn’t understand what was happening” with her mother’s health “decline”
- Emma Heming Willis, who was a guest on the show and whose husband Bruce Willis was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, shared that she had a similar experience with Bruce
Maria Menounos is reflecting on the emotional toll of witnessing her late mother’s health decline.
On the Tuesday, Nov. 4 episode of her Heal Squad podcast, the 47-year-old host told guest Emma Heming Willis that she often struggled to process the changes she saw in her mother, Litsa Menounos, amid her brain cancer diagnosis.
“When I was taking care of my mom with brain cancer, I was reading your book [The Unexpected Journey] and I just felt so [connected] — ooh. Here it goes,” Menounos told Heming Willis, 47, as she began tearing up.
“Yeah, it’s right there. Right? I know,” replied the model and actress, who revealed her husband Bruce Willis, 70, was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in 2023.
“Yeah, it’s like I didn’t understand what was happening because the decline was happening before the diagnosis, you know?” an emotional Menounos explained.
She continued, “And so you’re like, ‘Why is she burning all the food? Why is she so slow with everything? C’mon mom let’s go. What’s wrong?’ ”
She said this continued to happen after her mother — who died in 2021 — received the diagnosis and had brain surgery, despite her mother not having been diagnosed with “dementia” or “Alzheimer’s [Disease].”
“[Her] brain was affected, and they don’t tell you anything. When you said you got a pamphlet and you left, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I get it,’ ” Menounos shared.
“There were so many things I had to put together, [and] to go back to them and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, that happens all the time.’ And I’m like, ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve been suffering thinking that she’s being mean, thinking she’s doing this on purpose,’ ” she recalled.
Heming Willis noted that she had a similar experience after her husband’s diagnosis, saying, “We left with nothing as well. We left with nothing. It was… a diagnosis, an ‘Adios’ and that was it. And I needed to go and figure it out.”
“For so long I felt like I was going nuts. Like ‘Is this really what’s happening? Why isn’t anyone flagging anything?’ Like ‘What is going on?’ And I think that is the issue that so many [face]. I hear these stories so frequently,” she added.
She said that family members and caregivers are often left with “no roadmap” at the start, and it’s a “tall order” to then ask them “to have to dig so deep to find the answers.” She said that is the reason behind why she wrote her new book, The Unexpected Journey.
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“From that really traumatic appointment, that is where The Unexpected Journey was formed. I wrote the book I wish someone would have handed me the day that we received the diagnosis,” Heming Willis said.
The former E! News host said that there were “so many things” that Heming Willis shared in her book that she felt were “really, really important” for caregivers to know so that they didn’t feel “like a crazy person” — like she did as she was dealing with her mother’s symptoms.
“I think it’s a really important book for people, especially like I said the caregiving industry, it’s usually falling on the sister, the mother — it’s usually one of us that has to deal with this,” Menounos said.
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