Emma Heming Willis, who has been making rounds in support of The Unexpected Journey: Finding Strength, Hope and Yourself on the Caregiving Path, a new book inspired by life with Bruce Willis amid his dementia battle, has joined End Well's 2025 summit.
Set to take place at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles on Nov. 20, the gathering unites artists, healthcare providers, policy leaders, storytellers and caregivers for what is billed as a "full day of transformative conversations and hands-on learning," organized under a radical bravery theme. Heming Willis will team with Yvette Nicole Brown for a conversation about love, resilience and caregiving in the face of dementia. Brown has been a frequent partner of End Well.
"When my husband Bruce was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, I had to find courage I didn't know existed," said Heming Willis in a statement. "Radical bravery isn't about being fearless, it's about speaking out, even when you know you'll be criticized, so that others feel validated and supported. These conversations are important and can't wait. Every family deserves the tools and compassion to navigate dementia with dignity and love."
November's event will be hosted by another End Well vet, author and actress Tembi Locke, along with showrunner J.J. Duncan. Other speakers confirmed for the program include Dying for Sex podcast creator and Hulu show executive producer Nikki Boyer, physician and author Dr. Kathryn Mannix, pastor John Onwuchekwa, Stanford University professor Dr. Justin Nathaniel Baker, funeral director Joél Simone Maldonado, and psychiatrist and mental health influencer Dr. Sasha Hamdani.
Additional participants are expected. Across four main sessions, midday skill-building workshops and networking opportunities, participants will have the chance to explore urgent narratives shaping the end-of-life experience. A livestream will be available. End Well is a nonprofit founded in 2017 by Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider to help shape the dialogue around all things end-of-life, like grief, loss, caregiving and more.
"Radical bravery is about meeting the hardest moments of life with courage, compassion and connection," Ungerleider said in a statement. More information on this year's event can be found here.
Willis, the legendary 70-year-old actor, known for his roles in the Die Hard films, Moonlighting, Pulp Fiction and The Sixth Sense, among countless others, had his Hollywood career abruptly end in 2023, when his family announced that he had been diagnosed with aphasia and later frontotemporal dementia. "FTD is an umbrella term for a group of brain diseases that mainly affect the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain," according to the Mayo Clinic. It can impact a person's personality, behavior and language."
Heming Willis recently shared an update on how the actor is doing now during an interview with Diane Sawyer. She said that Willis is still walking, physically healthy and seemingly not aware of his condition. "Bruce is still very mobile. Bruce is in really great health overall, you know, it's just his brain that is failing him," she told Sawyer for the ABC News special.
Heming Willis later revealed that she made the challenging choice to move Bruce into a "second home" nearby, one that was safer for him and so that he could live with his 24-hour care team. "It was one of the hardest decisions that I've had to make so far," she admitted. "But I knew first and foremost, Bruce would want that for our daughters, you know, he wouldn't want them to be in a home that was more tailored to their needs, not his needs." She added that they're at the second home all the time, spending time with the actor, saying it's "a house that is filled with love and warmth and care and laughter."