The Willis family’s public journey with frontotemporal dementia underscores the truth Oakwood Creative Care has built its 50-year mission around: both the diagnosed and their care partners need real support to thrive.
Emma Heming Willis: The Unexpected Journey
Oakwood Creative Care (OCC), the Mesa-based nonprofit that has spent 50 years enhancing quality of life for older adults facing dementia and the family members who care for them, today recognized the enduring value of Emma Heming Willis’s story as a reminder to families and communities everywhere: a dementia diagnosis changes an entire family, and everyone in that family deserves support.
Emma Heming Willis has spoken openly about her husband Bruce Willis’s frontotemporal dementia (FTD) diagnosis and the disorientation, grief, and isolation that followed. Her New York Times bestselling book, The Unexpected Journey, published by Maria Shriver’s imprint The Open Field at Penguin Random House, describes walking out of the diagnosis appointment with little more than a pamphlet and no roadmap for what came next. Since then, she has become one of the most visible advocates for care partners in the country, building a community, an advocacy platform, and a wellness brand centered on a message OCC has championed since 1975: caring for the person facing the diagnosis and caring for the family around them are not separate jobs. They are the same job.
“Emma Heming Willis has done something incredibly generous with her family’s hardest moments: she turned them into a resource for millions of other families walking the same road,” said Sherri Friend, CEO of Oakwood Creative Care.
“We see the same story in our Clubs every day. The person with the diagnosis needs meaningful engagement and connection. Their spouse, their adult child, their sibling, needs rest, information, and a community that does not let them disappear into the role of caregiver. When we only support one half of that equation, both halves suffer.”
Equal Dementia Support on Both Sides
That two-sided approach is built into how Oakwood Creative Care operates across Mesa, Chandler, and Flagstaff. Its Adult Day Clubs and Brain Health Hubs give older adults living with dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and stroke-related conditions a place to create, move, and connect. At the same time, its care navigation services, support groups, counseling, and hands-on caregiver training classes exist for the family members holding everything together at home, the same care partners Willis writes about in her book. The goal on both sides of that equation is the same: nobody should have to face a diagnosis, or the caregiving that follows it, alone.
“What Emma Heming Willis’s story makes so visible is something families in our own community tell us privately all the time,” said Gordon Sims, Chief Philanthropy Officer at Oakwood Creative Care.
“Care partners often put themselves last, and they burn out because no one told them it was allowed to be any other way. The right supports, respite, education, community, and a place where their loved one can thrive, are not extras. They are what makes it possible for a family to sustain years of caregiving instead of being broken by it.”
Arizona has one of the fastest-growing rates of Alzheimer’s and related dementias in the nation, with nearly 152,000 Arizonans currently living with Alzheimer’s alone. Oakwood Creative Care encourages families newly facing a dementia diagnosis, in Arizona or anywhere else, to seek clinical guidance and community support early, and points to public resources like Willis’s book and platform asarting point, a meaningful st alongside local organizations equipped to walk the full journey with them.
Creative Aging, at Every Stage & for Every Age
Oakwood Creative Care is bringing back the JOY in aging! We believe a diagnosis should not have to define your life. Instead, we have devoted our mission to reigniting hope for caregivers and older adults with Alzheimer’s, dementia, and other age-related challenges.
