Ozzy Osbourne estimates that he has about a decade left to live after another botched back surgery left him “virtually crippled.” And when the time comes, the Prince of Darkness wants to go out on his own terms.
In his Rolling Stone UK profile published Thursday, Osbourne, 74, recalled having the conversation with his wife, Sharon Osbourne, 71, as she confronted him over smoking a joint.
“How long do you want me to f**king live for?!,” he fired back at her. “At best, I’ve got 10 years left and when you’re older, time picks up speed,” he told her.
He further explained to the magazine that he isn’t afraid of dying but rather of having “a long, painful, and miserable existence.”
As such, the Black Sabbath frontman actually has a mutual assisted suicide pact with Sharon that the agreed on nearly two decades ago.
“I like the idea that if you have a terminal illness, you can go to a place in Switzerland and get it done quickly,” he mused, adding that he had to watch his father waste away to cancer and Alzheimer’s and likely didn’t want to put his children through the same.
Now, Osbourne faces an array of serious health changes, starting with his 2003 Parkinson’s diagnosis as well as a bike crash that required metal rods to be put into his body.
Most recently, he had a fourth spinal surgery after hurting his back in a 2019 fall, and even had a large tumour removed from one of his vertebrae.
The rocker further reflected that he expected to be dead years ago, expressing “Sometimes I look in the mirror and go, ‘Why the f**k did you make it?!’… I should have been dead a thousand times.”