Speaking openly about his own mortality and his right to live happily or not at all, rocker Ozzy Osbourne revealed in a new interview that he believes he has "at best" a decade left before his time comes to shuffle off this mortal coil.
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Ozzy says in a wide-ranging discussion with Rolling Stone UK that he has begun to truly think about his own happiness amid his ongoing recovery from surgery and a battle with Parkinson's disease. "Look, I said to Sharon that I'd smoked a joint recently and she said, 'What are you doing that for! It'll f***ing kill you,'" Ozzy, explained. "I said, 'How long do you want me to f***ing live for?!' At best, I've got ten years left and when you're older, time picks up speed. Me and Sharon had our 41st wedding anniversary recently, and that's just unbelievable to me!"
Ozzy has undergone a number of debilitating operations over the years and says that his second spinal surgery didn't go as planned, leaving him "crippled," while adding his doctors also found a tumor during another procedure.
"It's really knocked me about," he says of the latest surgery, which went "drastically wrong and virtually left me crippled. I thought I'd be up and running after the second and third," he says, "but with the last one, they put a f***ing rod in my spine. They found a tumor in one of the vertebrae, so they had to dig all that out too. It’s pretty rough, man, and my balance is all f***ed up."
"I don't fear dying, but I don't want to have a long, painful, and miserable existence," Osbourne explains. "I like the idea that if you have a terminal illness, you can go to a place in Switzerland and get it done quickly. I saw my father die of cancer," he continued.
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"Why am I the last man standing?" Ozzy asks. "I don't understand any of it. Sometimes I look in the mirror and go, 'Why the f*** did you make it?!'" he admits. "I'm not boasting about any of it because I should have been dead a thousand times. I've had my stomach pumped God knows how many times," referring to his past with alcohol and substance abuse.
"I'm taking it one day at a time, and if I can perform again, I will," he says. "But it's been like saying farewell to the best relationship of my life. At the start of my illness, when I stopped touring, I was really pissed off with myself, the doctors, and the world. But as time has gone on, I've just gone, 'Well, maybe I've just got to accept that fact.'"
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Not being able to say one last farewell has been weinging on his mind often, he adds. "That's one of the things I've been the most f***ing pissed off at: I never got the chance to say goodbye or thank you... Because my fans are what it's all about. If I can just do a few gigs… They've been loyal to me for f***ing years. If I can't continue doing shows on a regular basis, I just want to be well enough to do one show where I can say, 'Hi guys, thanks so much for my life,'" Ozzy says. "That's what I'm working towards, and if I drop down dead at the end of it, I’ll die a happy man."