‘you never get over it’

Sharon Osbourne just admitted that it has been very hard for her since husband, Ozzy Osbourne passed away over a year ago.

Although he had suffered from health problems for years, including Parkinson’s disease and a fractured vertebra, his death was still a shock.

Less than three weeks beforehand, he had been on stage in Birmingham, playing a triumphant farewell concert, Back to the Beginning.

“He was just so, so happy,” recalls his wife Sharon. “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,’” Sharon added.

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,” she said of the time she realized Ozzy had passed away.

The 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.’”

Sharon further mentioned, “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 as thousands of people lined the streets of Birmingham, laying floral tributes and singing Black Sabbath songs while 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 Osbourne 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.

She assured that the fans’ cards and messages were all collected, sorted and photographed; while the flowers were composted for the family garden, where Ozzy Osbourne is buried.