BBCIt’s been 15 months since Ozzy Osbourne died, at the age of 76, at his home in Buckinghamshire.
Although he had suffered from health problems for years, including Parkinson’s disease and a fractured vertebra, his death was a shock.
Less than three weeks beforehand, he had been on stage in Birmingham, playing a triumphant farewell concert.
After the show, he was on a high.
“He was online, going through the reviews and saying, ‘There’s something terribly wrong’, and I’m like, ‘Why?’
“He goes, ‘I didn’t get slagged by anybody. Why are people being nice to me?’
“And I’m like, ‘Because they like you’.”
On the morning he died, Ozzy had woken up early and gone downstairs for his usual morning workout. Shortly afterwards, he had a heart attack. An air ambulance was called and paramedics tried to save him. But it was too late.
“I was asleep,” says Sharon.
“We’d spoken in the night. Ozzy had woken in the night and he asked me to kiss him twice, and I did.
“And then he said, ‘Hold me, hold me tight,’ and I did.
“And then the next thing I know, it’s early in the morning, and someone comes rushing into the room saying, ‘Come down now’.
“I ran down, and that was it.”
Getty ImagesThe grief, she says, will never leave.
“You’ve lost the love of your life, so you don’t just wake up and go, ‘I’m fine now. I’m cured’.
“You never get over it. But you learn to live with it, and that’s what I’m trying to do. So you either sit in a room and don’t come out, or you accept it, befriend it, and that’s it.”
The affection among Ozzy’s fans was apparent before the singer’s funeral. Thousands of people lined the streets of Birmingham, laying floral tributes and singing Black Sabbath songs as Ozzy’s body was transported through his home city in a hearse topped by a purple floral tribute in the shape of a cross.
Sharon says he would have been mystified by the outpouring of love.
“He’d have been like, ‘What’s the matter with you guys? Go home!'” she says.
But for the family, the public response was a huge source of comfort.
Daughter Kelly said last year: “I never could have imagined it to be as helpful as it has been to know that we’re not alone in our grief and our sadness, and that the rest of the world loved him as much as we did.”
Sharon says the fans’ cards and messages were all collected, sorted and photographed; while the flowers were composted for the family garden, where Ozzy is buried.
“There was no way I could put Ozzy in a public graveyard,” she says.
“I’ve seen what happens to other people in the public eye. There’s no peace because people want to come and they want to pay their respects. That’s an ongoing thing, and I wanted Ozzy to rest and just be.”
Does she visit him often?
“Of course, every day. I can see him from my window.”
She still talks to him regularly, she says. Asked what she discusses, she puts a finger to her lips and gives a gentle “shh”.
ReutersOzzy and Sharon’s relationship spanned more than 50 years.
They met in 1970 and married in 1982. Their time together could be turbulent – he was arrested for attempting to murder her in 1989 (she dropped the charges), and they split briefly in 2016 amid rumours of infidelity – but the couple maintained that they were soulmates.
“It was an unusual relationship because we had such highs and such terrible lows,” she admits. But at the end of his life, “he knew” how much he was loved.
You can see proof of that love – from his family, his fans and his bandmates – in a new documentary about his final gig at Birmingham’s Villa Park last year, when he reunited with heavy rock legends Black Sabbath.
Titled Back To The Beginning, it features more than 25 of the songs played at that star-studded concert, including Ozzy’s solo set and Sabbath’s entire performance.
In backstage footage, fellow A-list performers discuss the star’s influence in awestruck tones.
“If there was no Sabbath, there’s no Metallica,” says the band’s frontman James Hetfield. “It’s as simple as that.”
Yungblud, whose version of Changes was one of the concert’s emotional high points, talks about how, as a kid who didn’t fit in, Ozzy changed his life.
“The fact he was celebrated for his madness and his individuality gave me hope.”
Sharon says the concert was Ozzy’s final wish: the one thing that would make him happy after years of deteriorating health.
But it almost never happened.
Six months before the show, Ozzy fell and fractured his vertebrae. In recovery, he caught pneumonia three times. After surgery on his back, he caught sepsis and nearly died.
Two weeks before the show, doctors urged him to call it off.
“They came to see us at the house and they said, ‘You can’t do this. We’re advising you not to do this. Your heart’s too weak’,” Sharon recalls.
But the singer was determined to see it through. In the film, it’s hard to believe he’s so ill. Although he performs seated on a throne, his eyes are full of life and his voice is powerful. As he looks out at the crowd, he seems elated.
Backstage, Sharon admits, “the whole family was terrified”. But something changed when Ozzy entered the stadium.
“He was sat in his dressing room, watching everybody on a screen performing, and he was like, ‘I just can’t believe they’re all here’.
“It’s amazing what support and love and determination can do for you, because [before the show] he was somebody that couldn’t breathe. He had a lung condition. He had a heart condition. He had terrible, terrible agony from his spine. He had blood clots and he had Parkinson’s.
“Some days just to even talk was an effort, let alone sing. And I don’t know how he did it, but he did it.
“And you saw it in his eyes, in his face. It just made him feel like he was alive again.”
Getty ImagesThe effect was so galvanising that, when he came off stage, Ozzy declared he wanted to go on tour.
“He was raring to go,” Sharon laughs. “He was like, ‘I can do this, and the fans don’t mind if I’m sat down’.”
It’s an incredible and rare thing, I suggest, to be able to grant your partner their last wish.
Ozzy may have suffered immense pain in his final years, but he was able to say goodbye in style.
“To quote one of his songs, he was flying high again,” Sharon says.
“He was just floating for those last 17 days. It was great. It was joyous.”
