Here’s the uncomfortable place to start: Ozzy Osbourne is very much alive as of this writing, and the internet’s appetite for pre-written eulogies does him no favors. Still, the sentiment behind the rumor—that a legend, worn down by Parkinson’s and years of hard miles, might ask for one last act of agency—rings true to the man he’s always been. So let’s set aside the false headline and talk about the real thing: a final wish that isn’t about spectacle so much as dignity. If Ozzy ever asked Sharon for anything at the end, you can bet it would be simple, stubborn, and aimed straight at the heart of where he came from.

The house in Buckinghamshire has seen its share of storms. Lately, the quiet has gotten louder. Parkinson’s has a way of shrinking a world that used to run on jet fuel. The body disobeys; the mind, if you’re lucky, keeps the lights on. By Ozzy’s own account, recent years have been “sheer hell”—surgery after surgery, a parade of doctors, public cancellations that feel like small funerals. And yet the spark remains. You can see it in the interviews: the timing, the bite, the rascal humor that refuses to retire. The machine creaks; the current is still live.

If you’ve followed the Osbournes past the memes and the bat lore, you know Sharon has always been the counterweight. He’s chaos; she’s the metronome. She built the solo career, brokered the comebacks, and turned reality TV into a second life. When the ground dropped out, she stitched together the floor. People mistake that for control. It’s more like stewardship. Love doesn’t always look soft; sometimes it looks like a contract with reality.

So imagine the ask. Not a swan song world tour—not with that spine, those tremors, that ruthless disease. One night. One city. Birmingham, where John Michael Osbourne grew up under soot-gray skies and found music because nothing else made sense. The point wouldn’t be legacy. The point would be extraction: lifting one clean, defiant memory out of the mess. No wheelchairs in the montage, no hospital smell on the tape. Just a voice, cracked maybe, but honest. A roar that remembers how to be a roar.

Could he do it? The clinical answer is complicated; the human answer is the one that built his career. Ozzy has never been about polish. He’s about transfer—energy changing hands between stage and crowd. Even in decline, that transaction is possible. A verse and a chorus can do more heavy lifting than any medical chart. And Sharon, who understands timing as well as any arena architect, would stack the deck: the right night, a set trimmed to the muscle, a band that knows how to carry him without showing the carry. You don’t fake strength; you design around it.

We romanticize these farewells and then punish artists for failing to meet the myth. The truth is plainer. Bodies break. Pride bends. What’s left is the choice of how to be seen. Ozzy’s best work—pick your era: Sabbath’s industrial blues, the early solo albums built on Randy Rhoads’ vertigo riffs, even the late-period singles that sneak up on you—wasn’t about technical perfection. It was about invitation. Come into the storm with me. I’ll be your unreliable narrator. We’ll make it out together, or at least louder.

There’s a line he’s repeated over the years, lightly, like a joke with teeth: I’m still here. It’s not bravado. It’s a thesis. Plenty of men from similar streets, with similar appetites, didn’t make it to middle age, let alone their seventies. Ozzy did—messily, expensively, with lapses and mea culpas and a family that turned endurance into a team sport. That survival isn’t pretty. It’s admirable in the way a battered amplifier is admirable: it hums because someone keeps repairing what the current burns out.

If you’re looking for the moral inventory, spare me. The man chewed through excess and paid for it in public. He also gave us a genre’s central paradox: music about doom that made people feel less doomed. That matters. It’s why a final wish, real or imagined, wouldn’t be a monument. It would be a service: one last transaction between a working-class kid and the city that raised him rough.

Picture the logistics Sharon would marshal, because this is where the story becomes her story too. She knows the weight of secrecy, not for the spectacle but for the sanctity. Bring back the old crew—the ones who can read his breath like a click track. Set it in Birmingham. Dim the lights a shade darker than nostalgia. Keep the cameras, lose the angles that mistake frailty for failure. If he falters, the band tightens. If he stands, the crowd does the holding. You don’t protect a legacy by polishing it; you protect it by telling the truth without flinching.

And the truth is that Parkinson’s doesn’t negotiate. It takes. Some days it takes everything. The countermeasure isn’t denial; it’s framing. A song becomes a vessel big enough to carry what the body can’t. If he only gets through half of “War Pigs” or “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” that half becomes the point: a fragment sharp enough to cut through the noise of a million cheap obituaries waiting in drafts.

I can hear the objection from the sensible corner: why risk it? Why not protect the memory of prime Ozzy and let the man rest? Fair. But artists don’t live inside our museum glass. They live in the today that scares them and the stage that still promises a particular kind of mercy. A final bow done right isn’t a violation of the past. It’s consent in the present.

So no, the headline you saw wasn’t true. Not yet, and maybe not for a long time if the stubborn streak keeps winning rounds. But embedded in the fiction is something like accuracy: a wish formed in the shape of a life. Go back to the beginning. Say goodbye in the language that made you somebody. Let the people who carried you feel you push back one more time.

If we’re lucky, we’ll get that night. Maybe scaled down, maybe seated, maybe with more silence between the notes than the old days allowed. It won’t matter. The greats don’t need perfection to make a case for themselves. They need context, care, and a room full of witnesses who understand that survival is its own kind of show.

And when it’s over—whenever it’s over—let the memory settle where it belongs. Not in the circus of last breaths, but in the stubborn, generous act of a battered voice finding pitch long enough to tell the truth: I’m still here. For now, that’s enough.