Sharon Osbourne reveals doctors told Ozzy he was too sick to do his final concert

Sharon Osbourne has shed light on Ozzy Osbourne’s final weeks as she reflected on her husband’s life and legacy a year on from his death.

The couple were married for 43 years and Sharon was the Black Sabbath frontman’s manager right up until his death on July 22 last year, aged 76, following a battle with Parkinson’s disease.

Sharon revealed doctors told Ozzy not to do his Back to the Beginning farewell concert at Villa Park in Birmingham just weeks before his death, but he didn’t listen.

“Ozzy knew that he was dying,” she revealed to Forging Metal podcast host Ed James and a live audience in a local pub.

“He was told two weeks before the show that he was dying, and they said ‘don’t do the show’. He said ‘yeah, right. Get out of here’.”

The widow called it “a gift” for her husband to be able to do the concert and witness the love from fans, rather than it be a memorial sort of show after he died.

“His greatest love affair was with the audience and that’s the way he wanted to go out,” Sharon said.

“Just one more time and he got to do that — and he smashed it.”

Sharon says the concert left Ozzy riding on an absolute high for his final two weeks, after being “so down, so depressed because he knew it was the end”.

“[It] was the happiest I had ever seen him,” she said, adding: “It was just so great to see him every day smiling.”

Sharon was back in Birmingham to mark the city’s first-ever Ozzy Day, taking place on the first anniversary of his death on Tuesday.

The widow fought back tears as she spoke of her husband and his love for the city that made him.

“I can’t forget what Birmingham did for Ozzy, it’s who my husband is, what he is and will always be,” she said.

“He wasn’t one of those guys who got rich and famous and started to talk like he went to Oxford.”

Sharon then gave an example of just how down-to-earth he could be - leaving King Charles “hysterical laughing” after expletive-filled comments at a formal dinner inside Windsor Castle.

“He spoke to him like he was one of the guys at the factory, that’s what was so great about him,” she said with a laugh, adding that she did try and kick her husband under the table.

Ozzy and Sharon’s younger daughter Kelly Osbourne took to social media to reflect on the loss of her dad and the “endless ache” of grief over the last 12 months.

“I don’t just mourn the father I lost. I mourn the soul I was before death taught my heart its own name,” she wrote in a text post against a black background.

“There is a grief that steals more than the person you love. It quietly takes the light from your laughter, the innocence from your hope, and the stranger you become is someone you’ll spend a lifetime trying to recognise.

“People think grief is missing someone who is gone, but the deepest sorrow is waking each day longing for the version of yourself who died with them. Grief is a language no one truly speaks until life forces it upon them.

“It cannot be explained, borrowed, or imagined. You only understand its endless ache when you’ve stood in the unbearable silence, carrying a love that has nowhere left to go.”

Kelly, who got engaged to partner Sid Wilson backstage at her dad’s final show, added that her life has now been split into two - that of before and after her dad’s death.

“I miss who I was before my daddy died,” the 41-year-old wrote.

“Before my heart became a home for absence. Before every memory became both a blessing and a wound. Some losses don’t simply break you. They divide your life into two people. The one you were before, and the one left behind.

“And perhaps that is grief’s cruellest truth. Not that death takes the ones we love, but that it leaves us living as ghosts of the people we used to be.”

Kelly’s younger brother Jack Osbourne, 40, also took to social media, saying the month in the lead up to the anniversary has been a “mixed bag of emotions”.

He seemingly reshared every tribute to his father’s death, along with many Ozzy Day celebration posters.

Their eldest sister Aimee Osbourne, 42, is largely out of the spotlight and off social media.