“Back to the Beginning”: Saying Goodbye to the King Who Taught Us to Stay
Last weekend, I saw something end that I thought would never end.
Ozzy Osbourne—The Prince of Darkness, the madman, the myth—sat before us not as the unbreakable icon of decades past, but as a tired king. Tired, yes. But still radiant with love. Still impossibly alive in the way that only legends are. He sat not like someone who had run out of time, but like someone who had given it all. And in that moment, we were all with him, sharing in something we could hardly understand. We weren’t just watching a concert. We were part of a farewell to a piece of our souls.
“Back to the Beginning” wasn’t just a performance. It was a pilgrimage. A spiritual journey through everything we were when those first thundering notes rewrote our DNA. Every chord from Tony Iommi’s guitar, every crash of the drums, every trembling vibration from the speakers—it was more than music. It was the sound of our youth, our rebellion, our catharsis. It was a collection of memories hidden in distortion.
When “Paranoid” erupted through the night, I turned around and saw people with tears in their eyes—people who had probably heard that song a thousand times before, but never quite like this. It wasn’t just nostalgia. It wasn’t just a favorite tune. It was the realization that something we always assumed would be there was now stepping into history. This wasn’t the end of a show. It was the end of an era.
Ozzy stood—or rather, sat—with a presence that shook us to our cores. He looked out at us, broken in body perhaps, but whole in spirit. And when he said, “I fucking love you,” looking each of us in the eyes, something unexplainable passed through the crowd. There was a silence, brief but eternal, that said, we love you too, Ozzy. We always have. We always will.
That was the moment I finally understood that rock can be incredibly romantic. Not in the way of flowers and handwritten letters, but in its raw, visceral devotion. In the way it teaches you to stay—to commit, to endure, to burn with the same fire even as the world around you changes.
Rock isn’t just power chords and anthems. It’s loyalty. It’s showing up, again and again, because those sounds were there when you needed them. Because those lyrics spoke when you couldn’t. Because those shows gave you a place to belong when nowhere else felt like home. It’s staying in love with something—even when the hair goes grey, the legs give out, and the voice trembles—because it once made you feel infinite.
Ozzy taught us that. Black Sabbath taught us that.
And last night, we gave that love back.
We didn’t cheer because the performance was flawless (though it was unforgettable). We cheered because he stayed. Through illness, through pain, through time. He showed up for us one more time. That alone was enough.
As the final notes rang out, as the stage dimmed and the silence returned, there was no rush to leave. People just stood there. Eyes closed. Smiling. Crying. Remembering. It wasn’t grief. It was reverence. The kind you feel at the end of a book that changed you. The kind you carry with you forever.
So thank you, Sabbath.
Thank you for making me fall in love with every note the way you fall in love with a person.
Not perfectly, but completely.
With loyalty, with anger, and with every part of my soul.
You taught me that beginnings aren’t always about starting over. Sometimes, they’re about carrying what we love forward. Inside of us. In echoes. In riffs. In memories that sing long after the amplifiers go quiet.
“Back to the Beginning”… but the beginning, this time, is inside us.
