Jack Osbourne has given a blunt and moving assessment of how his mother, Sharon Osbourne, is coping after the death of her husband, rock singer Ozzy Osbourne, saying she is buoyed by public support even as grief remains close to the surface. “She’s okay, but she’s not okay,” Jack said in a Good Morning America interview aired this week, describing the “outpour of love” for his father since July as deeper than the family anticipated. “None of us expected it to be like this with that outpour of love,” he said, adding that his mother “feels the love” from fans and well-wishers around the world.
Jack, 39, spoke in the segment about the shock of the moment he learned of his father’s passing and the emotional whiplash of grief that followed. He recounted waking to a pre-dawn knock at his Los Angeles home from a longtime family staffer and immediately understanding that something was wrong. “I wish he was still here. I wish he was still with us all,” he said, but acknowledged the severity of his father’s recent health struggles. “No one expected it to happen as quickly as it did and when it did,” he added, contrasting the family’s hopes after Ozzy’s farewell concert in early July with the rapid decline that led to his death later that month.
Ozzy Osbourne died on July 22, 2025, at the age of 76, with his family announcing that the Black Sabbath frontman and reality-television figure had passed away “surrounded by love.” The statement, issued the same day, followed his last public performance on July 5 in Birmingham, England, where he appeared seated for portions of a final “Back to the Beginning” show tied to Black Sabbath’s legacy in their home city. The family asked for privacy at the time while acknowledging the scale of the public reaction to the loss of an artist whose career spanned more than five decades and helped define heavy metal as a global genre.
In the weeks that followed, officials confirmed that Osbourne suffered a fatal heart attack; reports citing the death certificate noted coronary artery disease as an underlying condition, alongside years of Parkinson’s disease that complicated his final period of ill health. The formal accounting aligned with the trajectory of his last years, which included surgeries to address injuries from a 2019 fall and a progressive loss of mobility. Those medical struggles, visible in his final on-stage appearance, had already forced the cancellation of touring plans even as he remained intent on performing again.
The most visible public farewell came eight days after his death, when thousands lined central Birmingham for a procession that carried the singer’s cortege past landmarks linked to his career and the city’s musical history. Sharon, Jack and Kelly Osbourne were seen placing flowers and reading tributes at the Black Sabbath Bridge on Broad Street as crowds chanted his name. The procession concluded before a private funeral, with local authorities closing roads to accommodate mourners and media. Images from the day captured a mix of civic ceremony and raw fan emotion, underscoring the way Osbourne’s persona bridged working-class Birmingham roots and international superstardom.
Sharon Osbourne, 72, remained largely private through the summer, then addressed the public directly in mid-September in an Instagram post thanking fans for their messages. “I’m still having trouble finding the words to express how grateful I am for the overwhelming love and support you’ve shown on social media,” she wrote. “Your comments, posts, and tributes have brought me more comfort than you know. None of it has gone unnoticed, in fact, it’s carried me through many nights.” Her words echoed Jack’s description of the family’s experience: a deep, personal loss softened at times by the scale of response from those who followed Osbourne’s work as a singer and as the cantankerous, funny patriarch of a household that remade reality television.
Jack’s remarks this week returned frequently to that double track of public and private grief. He described his mother as functioning day to day—fielding condolences, participating in commitments tied to long-planned projects—but also as a widow adjusting to the absence of a partner whose life and work had been bound up with hers since the early 1980s. He did not elaborate on any medical specifics beyond what has already been made public, focusing instead on how the family is absorbing the loss and how Sharon has responded to repeated gestures of support from fans at home and abroad. The image is of a family that has long lived in public, now choosing its moments carefully while acknowledging a constituency that refuses to let Osbourne’s memory fade.
The interview also served as a pivot to two projects that frame the late singer’s final years in his own words and through the lens of collaborators and family members. The one-hour BBC One film Sharon & Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home premiered on October 2 and is available on BBC iPlayer in the U.K., drawing on footage gathered over several years to document the couple’s return to Britain, the decision to attempt one last concert in Birmingham and the toll of Parkinson’s disease. Five days later, Paramount+ debuted Ozzy: No Escape from Now, a feature documentary directed by Tania Alexander that tracks his health crisis, his determination to work, and the family dynamics that shaped his final chapter. Early accounts have highlighted the film’s unsparing treatment of pain and depression alongside Osbourne’s humor and work ethic.
A third vantage point arrived this week with the publication of Osbourne’s posthumous memoir, Last Rites, released on October 7 and completed shortly before his death. In it, he writes that he and Sharon rarely discussed mortality with their children, but that husband and wife did confront it together at least once. “The only conversation I’ve had with Sharon was when we decided we wanted to be buried together,” he wrote. “I’ve also said to Sharon, don’t you dare go before me. It’s my biggest fear now, Sharon leaving this world before I do. If she does, I won’t be too far behind. I live for the woman.” He rejected rumors of a “suicide pact,” writing, “That’s bulls—. We just don’t want some drawn-out end on a breathing tube.” The book revisits early near-death experiences, substance abuse, and his resolve to get back on stage despite escalating physical limits.
Jack said in remarks tied to the memoir’s release that his father had been “chipping away at it over the last three or four years,” and that few family members had yet read the finished manuscript amid the rawness of the summer. He asked readers to approach it as his father would have wanted—without pity. “My father would want people to smile, laugh, and feel love when they read it. He absolutely hated when people felt sorry for him,” Jack said in a statement accompanying the release, encouraging fans to “remember who he will always be.” The sentiment tracks with the tone of both documentaries: unvarnished in their depiction of a body failing a still-restless mind, but insistent that the career and the personality they document are larger than any diagnosis.
The family’s itinerary since July has mixed private mourning with public duties linked to those projects and to Birmingham’s civic memorials. In the city’s center, flowers and notes continue to collect at sites associated with Black Sabbath and Osbourne’s earliest performances, while the Black Sabbath Bridge on Broad Street has functioned as an unofficial shrine since the procession. Local authorities extended hours and adjusted pedestrian access during peak periods of visitation. For Sharon Osbourne, whose career as Ozzy’s manager and television host often placed her at the crucial junction between art and commerce, the rituals of release dates and premieres now also serve as a structure for grief—the unavoidable calendar that carries a family forward after a loss.
The facts that anchor this week’s coverage are already familiar to fans who followed the final, stop-start phase of Osbourne’s career. He revealed in 2020 that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease years earlier, insisting at the time, “It’s not a death sentence,” and then publicly documented surgeries and treatment that failed to restore his mobility enough for touring. He canceled European dates in 2023, floated and then withdrew a high-profile festival appearance, and kept working in the studio with producer Andrew Watt, releasing late-period albums that drew strong notices. Even so, he and the original members of Black Sabbath focused on the achievable: one hometown farewell, staged with accommodations for his condition and announced as a symbolic “full stop” even as he and his family hoped it might lead to more.
Jack’s language about his mother—“okay, but not okay”—reflects those layers. Sharon and Ozzy met in 1970 and married in 1982, and much of the public understands their marriage as a saga that contained both public crisis and improbable endurance: separations, reconciliations, vows renewed in 2017, and a late-life move back to the U.K. after decades in California. The July procession, where she stood with their children to accept tributes from strangers who had made his music part of their own lives, was an extension of that story: private loss performed in a public square, for a figure whose celebrity was always a mixture of theatrics and unguarded domesticity. Jack’s update does not pretend to resolve the contradiction. It acknowledges that a widow can appreciate letters, pictures and crowds and still be not okay, that gratitude and absence can coexist, and that time does different work for the bereaved than it does for those who merely admired the deceased.
For many fans, the arc of the past year will be plotted backward from the July funeral rites to the July 5 concert and then forward again to the releases of October. In that frame, the interview with Jack operates as connective tissue between events: the ordinary language of a son describing his mother’s days as she navigates a changed house, a schedule of memorial obligations and the quiet that follows visitors’ departures. There is no hint from the family that they intend to retreat completely; public-facing projects were already in motion, and Sharon continues to manage commitments. But neither is there a suggestion of hurry. The terms appear to be theirs, shaped by the calendar of films and a book that together amount to an authorized last word.
Those memorials also help fix the particulars that online rumor often distorts. The record is straightforward: a 76-year-old singer and television personality, hobbled by years of illness, achieved a final, seated appearance in his home city; 17 days later he died at home of a heart attack; and eight days after that, his family rode with him through the streets of Birmingham to a private ceremony. From there, the family’s communications have consisted of short statements, a handful of interviews, and now two films and a memoir that build out the detail without compromising privacy. The consistency of that message—acknowledging pain, elevating work, and recognizing the public without yielding the private—mirrors the way the Osbournes controlled their narrative at different points over the past quarter-century, first in a television experiment that would become a template for a genre and now in a set of valedictions that pull the camera back.
What remains—and what Jack nodded to in his “okay, but not okay” shorthand—is the work of grief as it actually happens. In his telling, Sharon’s days are steadied by what the public has offered and destabilized by the ordinary shocks of memory that follow a long marriage. That is the context in which fans will watch the new documentaries and read the book: not as a collection of artifacts, but as aids to understanding a life that did not end with a final bow on stage or with a procession through a city that claims him as its own. For those closest to him, the story is still happening. For the rest of the world, these releases will capture what the family has chosen to share: a portrait of a man who accepted limits reluctantly, worked until he could not, and left behind a record that explains, in his own words and with the help of those who loved him, what it felt like to be Ozzy Osbourne at the end.
The family’s decision to speak sparingly but clearly—Jack in interview, Sharon in a short public note—fits a pattern that has served them since July. It leaves room for ordinary sentences to carry weight: a son’s admission that grief comes and goes in waves; a widow’s thanks for messages that “carried me through many nights.” For now, that is the update, and it is enough: Sharon Osbourne is surviving and grieving, “okay, but not okay,” upheld by what strangers have sent her and by a family that has lived this story in public and intends, on its own terms, to keep telling it.