Like Rumer, Heming is filled with thanks, even as she grapples with waves of anguish.
“I’ve had to learn to walk alongside the grief,” she told 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 am also not going to just allow it to be this one note.”
For Heming, “the grief I feel over what’s 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’s admitted things were so bad, she considered divorce.
“I felt like my marriage was crumbling,” she’s said of miscommunications and changes in her husband’s personality. She’d ask herself, “‘What is going on? This is not the person that I married. Something is just so off.’ And I just couldn’t figure it out.”
Then everything finally clicked into place.
The Emmy winner, whose childhood stutter had also inexplicably returned, saw a neurologist who delivered the shocking diagnosis.
Though Heming was relieved she “finally understood that those crazy marital issues were not Bruce,” she said, it pained her to know “they were the result of his brain being dismantled, taking part of the husband I knew and loved with it.”
Bruce was sent home with just a pamphlet, leaving Heming, now a caregiver on top of being a wife and mother, to forge a path forward.
It was “traumatic,” she confessed. Her feelings of helplessness led her to write a book for other caregivers, The Unexpected Journey: Finding Strength, Hope, and Yourself on the Caregiving Path, which was a bestseller this fall.
