Some weeks feel heavier than others. Not because the calendar says so. Not because tragedy itself is rare—death moves through every week like fog. But because sometimes loss has a shape, a face, a voice you didn’t realize had been echoing in the corners of your life until the silence arrives.
This week, we lost two.
One was known more for music. The other, for acting.
Both architects of something bigger than entertainment culture.
And one of them was Ozzy.
Ozzy Osbourne.
Lead singer of Black Sabbath.
Rock god.
Sabbath’s frontman.
The man who growled verses that sounded like scripture torn from a post-apocalyptic Bible.
The soft-speaking Brit whose singing voice sounded clearer than his speech.
The one who turned chaos into chorus.
I wasn’t a disciple. I didn’t wear the T-shirts or memorize the track lists.
But I knew Ozzy.
That’s the thing about culture—you don’t have to invite it in for it to sit down in your house.
You could’ve never bought an album and still know the riffs of “Iron Man.”
You could’ve avoided MTV and still felt the Osbournes crawling across the pop landscape.
You didn’t have to watch the show to be caught in the blast radius of what it pioneered: celebrity confession as spectacle. The camera lens as altar.
Ozzy was always there, somewhere between myth and meme.
Slurred sentences, eyeliner, doves, bats, and blurred subtitles.
A walking contradiction—strange, chaotic, fragile, funny, wild, legendary.
And now he’s gone.
And I find myself asking the question that grief always drags behind it:
What do we do now?
Do we forget?
Do we remember?
Or do we simply move forward?
The Gen X in me tends to lean toward forgetting. We were built to press forward, to walk away from burning buildings and collapsing ideas.
We buried our childhoods in cassette tapes and camcorder memories.
We watched the world grow louder, faster, and messier, and we learned to keep moving.
Because that’s what survival looked like.
But forgetting has a cost.
And sometimes that cost is ourselves.
So I try to remember.
Not just the famous bits—the hair, the stage presence, the controversy.
But what did his existence mean to a culture that was always looking for an edge?
Ozzy didn’t just perform chaos.
He was the chaos.
And somehow, he turned that chaos into art.
That, to me, is the lesson.
He didn’t tidy up his pain for mass consumption.
He screamed it.
He played it at maximum volume.
He lived it—and maybe stumbled through it—but he offered it to us without polish or apology.
And that makes me think about grief in a different way.
The point isn’t to forget, or even to remember perfectly.
Maybe it’s simply to hold space—however messy, however incomplete.
We remember not because it makes us better archivists, but because remembrance is resistance to the idea that people disappear completely when they die.
We carry them forward—not in perfection, but in pieces.
A lyric.
A laugh.
A guitar riff that rides the back of your throat when the room goes too quiet.
A moment in the car when the radio plays something old and loud and reckless and suddenly you’re sixteen again, unsure of everything but the volume.
So what now?
Now, we grieve.
Now, we say Rest in Power to the legends and the lost.
Now, we play the songs we half-remember and let them soundtrack the ache.
And then, yes—we move forward.
But we move forward with ghosts.
We let them walk beside us.
We let them interrupt the silence with memory.
We let them whisper in the spaces where culture once gave them a stage.
Because in the end, grief is not a detour.
It’s not the opposite of progress.
It’s part of the road.
And we don’t heal by forgetting.
We heal by carrying well.
Rest in peace, Ozzy.
You howled your way into the marrow of a generation.
We heard you.
And in our own way—we won’t forget.
By Kyle J. Hayes
kylehayesblog.com
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