Sharon Osbourne has opened up about her decision not to “go with Ozzy” in an assisted-suicide pact.
She first wrote about an agreement that she had made with her late husband in her 2007 memoir Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography, in which she explained that she and Ozzy had made a pact to go to the Swiss assisted-dying organisation Dignitas if either of them were to suffer from dementia. Ozzy later commented that the pact had been extended to include other sicknesses, including life-threatening disease and Alzheimer’s.
It is believed that they arrived at the pact after the passing of Sharon’s father, music mogul Don Arden, in 2007, and Sharon appeared to confirm on The Osbournes podcast in 2023 that the plan remained in place.
Ozzy passed away in July at the age of 76 from a heart attack and had been in poor health beforehand, suffering from coronary artery disease and Parkinson’s.
In a new interview on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Sharon spoke about her decision not to follow through on the pact, revealing that it was her love and commitment to her three children, Aimee, Kelly and Jack, that were central to her decision.
“I would have just gone with Ozzy… Oh, yeah, definitely, I’ve done everything I wanted to do,” she said. “But they’ve been, they’ve been, excuse me, unbelievably, just magnificent with me, all three of them.”
She also shared a personal story of a memory that was influential in her decision. “Years ago, when I had one of my mental breakdowns, I went into a little facility to help with my head,” she said. “And I’d there were two girls over there – they didn’t know each other, but they were in there, each mother had committed suicide, and I saw the state that these two young women were in and what it had done to their lives, and I thought, I will never, ever, ever do that to my kids.”
“Grief has now become my friend,” she continued. “It is very weird to me, you know, when you love someone that much and you’re grieving for them, it’s what I have to live with, and I’ll get used to it. I will, I have to, you know, things move on.”
In the same interview, Sharon revealed the touching final words that Ozzy said to her, sharing that the Black Sabbath icon was “up and down to the bathroom all night” and asked her to “wake up” around 4am.
“I said, ‘I’m already bloody awake, you’ve woken me up’,” she said, going on to recall his final words: “And he said, ‘Kiss me’, and then he said, ‘Hug me tight’.”
Sharing that he then “went downstairs, worked out for 20 minutes and passed away”, Sharon added that she felt a sense of regret that the discussion ended up being their last. She told Morgan: “I can’t help wondering if I should have, could I have? If only I’d have told him I loved him more. If only I’d have held him tighter.”
After Ozzy’s death over the summer, fans pushed to rename Birmingham Airport in honour of the late star and put a petition forward on Change.org, which now has over 75,000 signatures.
It was also recently revealed that the late singer had been posthumously honoured with the Birmingham Lord Mayor’s Award on what would have been his 77th birthday.
