Emma Heming says daughters inevitably grieve

Like Rumer, Heming is filled with gratitude even as she struggles with waves of anxiety.

“I had to learn to walk alongside the sadness,” she said Vogue Australia in October. “It’s always with me. I can’t shake it, but I’m going to breathe, and I’m going to be sad and all the feelings and emotions that I’m going to feel, but I’m also not going to just let it be this one note.”

According to Heming, “the sadness I feel about what is happening is rooted in the deep love I have for Bruce and my family. There is so much beauty in that.”

Getting to this place wasn’t easy, especially during the “chaotic” years before Bruce’s diagnosis.

Emma admitted that things were so bad that she was considering divorce.

“I felt like my marriage was crumbling,” she says of miscommunication and changes in her husband’s personality. She wondered, ‘What’s going on? This is not the person I married. Something isn’t right.’ And I just couldn’t understand it.”

Then everything finally clicked into place.

The Emmy winner, whose childhood stuttering had also inexplicably returned, saw a neurologist who made the shocking diagnosis.

Although Heming was relieved to “finally understand that those crazy marital problems weren’t Bruce’s,” she said, it pained her to know “that they were the result of his brain being dismantled, taking with it part of the man I knew and loved.”

Bruce was sent home with only a pamphlet, leaving Heming, who is now a wife and mother as well as a caregiver, to forge a path forward.

It was “traumatic,” she admitted. Her feelings of helplessness led her to write a book for other caregivers, The unexpected journey: strength, hope and finding yourself on the care pathwhich was a bestseller this fall.