How Ozzy Osbourne helped me navigate my grief

Boston Globe

3 days ago

With my father's passing, our souls were shattered. When we returned too soon to the same cemetery where we had just buried him to lay my grandmother to rest next to my grandfather, we were almost too numb to cry. Hours after her funeral, I sat in her bedroom, which felt painfully empty, looking for something on TV to distract me. And that's when I stumbled onto what was then MTV's latest reality show — '
I knew who Ozzy Osbourne was: Black Sabbath's singer. Bit the heads off a bird and a bat. Made songs akin to a screwdriver twisting into an eardrum. I wasn't a fan. And since I grew up during Sabbath's 1970s heyday, I was just enough of a church kid to find what I saw as the band's evocation of devil stuff too creepy.
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But something about the show's opening theme, with its '60s sitcom graphics, Ozzy's hit 'Crazy Train' fashioned into a Sinatra-style ring-a-ding-ding ditty, and Ozzy listed as 'The Dad,' drew me in. Eager for a respite from my grief, it didn't take much.
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Of course, the Osbournes — including Sharon, Ozzy's wife and manager, and their two bickering teenagers, Jack and Kelly, were nothing like my family. (Aimee, Ozzy and Sharon's oldest daughter, opted out of the show.) I didn't grow up in a Beverly Hills mansion. Our kitchen wasn't bigger than my first apartment. My father wasn't a heavy metal legend. F-bombs weren't tossed around like confetti. We didn't have dogs — and if we did, they would not have been defecating all over the place.
But there was a tenderness and humor that felt familiar. For all their profane squabbling, the Osbournes' love for each other was abundant. I found comfort in a family that felt intact, unlike what death had done to my own. Forget about the family's countless crucifixes, gaudy wealth that could buy everything but good taste, and the illuminated devil's head on the front door. It was moments with Ozzy watching 'The History Channel,' one of his favorite pastimes, on the couch with his arm slung over his son Jack's shoulders, or Sharon's motherly worries about her kids that genuinely made me smile for the first time in what felt like forever. Where my family's tragedies felt like a minefield, 'The Osbournes' provided a safe place to land.
And I wasn't alone in my enjoyment of this chaotic family sitcom. Within a month, 'The Osbournes' was the highest-rated show in MTV history and would later win an Emmy for outstanding nonfiction program (reality). In those days, I was the Globe's pop culture columnist and wrote about this surprising hit that had introduced Ozzy to millions of new fans:
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'Unlike other family sitcoms, there's no lessons to be learned, no heavy-handed morals to be shared by episode's end — just a train wreck of a father trying to negotiate the foibles of his family.' (The toll of Ozzy's legendary substance use disorders were already apparent in his 50s; in retrospect, he was less 'a train wreck' than a battle-scarred survivor of his excesses.)
Ozzy was a middle-aged dad befuddled by his kids, his wife, the passage of time and, mostly, himself — a lot like my father.
I hadn't thought much about 'The Osbournes' in years until I saw a Bluesky post on Tuesday about Ozzy's death at 76. I knew that earlier this month and, despite failing health, he gave his farewell performance at
Each person's mourning, unique and complicated, is theirs alone, so I won't pretend to know what the days, weeks, and years ahead will be like for the Osbournes without Ozzy. But for me this much remains true: During one of the most difficult periods of my life, the man known as 'The Prince of Darkness' unexpectedly became a life raft in my sea of unnavigable grief.
This is an excerpt from
, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Renée Graham.
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Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at