UPDATE TO BELOW STORY......
Ozzy Osbourne's second memoir, Last Rites, is out today.
His son Jack says he'd been working on it for the "last three or four years. He always felt he needed to do a follow-up to [2010's] I Am Ozzy, because so much had happened in the 20 years since that book was released. From life after the TV show, to the Black Sabbath reunion, to releasing his last two albums, and finally his health issues. It was important to him to capture all of that."
Asked what he thinks Ozzy would have liked readers to take away from the book, Jack says, "My father would want people to smile, laugh and feel love when they read it. He absolutely hated when people felt sorry for him. I know some fans will get emotional -- it’s hard not to -- but he couldn’t stand when people cried in front of him or got sad around him. So enjoy his words. Feel his energy. Remember who he will always be. And never stop loving him."
In the final chapter, finished two days before his death, Ozzy revealed that he had an arrhythmia and “a dodgy heart valve," adding that it's "never silly little things. It’s always life-or-death...
“The valve is 8% blocked, apparently. The sepsis also gave me something called arrhythmia -- when your heart can’t keep time, like a drummer in a bad pub band -- so cheers for that.”
He went on to write that doctors refused to operate on his valve because he would have had to come off the blood thinners he was taking to manage his Parkinson’s disease, which “would be too dangerous.
“Meanwhile, the thinners mean if I ever fall over, I’d bleed out in about five seconds. I’ve honestly lost count of the ways in which getting old sucks.”
And it was a heart attack that killed Ozzy on July 22nd at his Buckinghamshire estate. He was 76.
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Ozzy Osbourne summed up his career neatly in a posthumous memoir by saying, “I think I made a mark on the world."
The Black Sabbath icon died on July 22 at age 76, less than three weeks after his Back to the Beginning farewell concert in Birmingham, England. He’d been fighting health issues for years.
Osbourne reflects on his final years in Last Rites, which comes out tomorrow.
In an excerpt published by The Times, he shared his thoughts on the Back to the Beginning concert and nearly 60 years as a rock star.
Read More: Ozzy Osbourne: 'I Think I Made a Mark on the World'