Ozzy Osbourne died two days ago. Everyone knew he wasn’t doing well, but especially after his appearance just days before at the final Black Sabbath concert, this took most of us by surprise.

I can’t say I was ever really an Ozzy fan, but I grew up in the era in which many people were. One of my closest friends uses Crazy Train as her alarm.

There’s a saying about not speaking ill of the dead. I don’t subscribe to that myself. Dying doesn’t make anyone an angel. I think Ozzy would definitely have gotten a kick out of the concept that he was an angel. He had his faults like most human beings. He did have a lot of influence on a lot of musicians, both famous and not-so-famous. I didn’t go for his reality show, either, but he seemed to enjoy his grandchildren quite a bit and be a decent father.

There’s a group I admin that has to do with a band from that era, although a different type of music. Ozzy’s death was posted in the group. As I said, his loss was hitting people particularly hard. I think the suddenness, as well as the idea that our idols will live forever, has something to do with it. I wouldn’t have called it off-topic because people should be allowed to mourn those they admire.

I have a rule that I won’t let anyone with a Facebook account less than a year old in the group. This keeps down the spam and the trolls. We had someone new join a while back and I was pretty sure she was posting under a false name and likely someone who had been prevented from joining the group earlier or tossed from the group. She seemed younger than most of the people who had actually experienced this era of music, too. Her posts were annoying to some, but not off-topic, so I did nothing but keep an eye on her.

Under someone’s post mourning the loss of Ozzy, she decided to weigh in on the bat incident. I don’t have exactly what she said since I ended up deleting her comment to keep the peace, but it was along the lines of “the poor bat, I hope he can now finally rest in peace” and what an awful person Ozzy was for doing what he did.

Now, there’s a time and a place for everything. If she wanted to continue to hate Ozzy for something, I wouldn’t stop her. However, we have a significant number of talented musicians in the music business in the group, and I didn’t want a war to break out over her comment. I’d let people mourn their idol. Also, she had it wrong.

I answered her, explaining that what had happened was that someone threw the bat on stage, or it somehow landed there, and in the heat of the performance, Ozzy thought it was a rubber bat and picked it up and bit it. The result was his hospitalization and a series of very painful rabies shots. Things happen sometimes that we don’t intend to happen, no different than hitting a squirrel crossing the road, and he paid a price for it. That gave her an opportunity to back off or delete her comment. Instead, she doubled down, stating that even if it was a rubber bat, it showed what a horrible person he was that he would think to do that to a poor, defenseless creature. I responded with “Do you ever step on ants?”

Again, she had an opportunity to walk it back. When she responded even more beligerently, I deleted her comment and banned her from the group. One of her comments was, ‘How would I feel if someone had an Ozzy doll and bit the head off of it?’ I would laugh, and I bet Ozzy would think it was hysterical. I’m not the idiot whisperer. If she wants to believe that about him, it’s no skin off my back. I won’t have her disrupting the group, though, with that attitude, especially while fans were trying to process his death and mourn him. I’m not a fan of his like that, but I can understand what it feels like when someone you have admired for a long time and has had an influence on your life passes away.

There’s a time to keep your mouth shut. As a parent, I tried to teach my kids that there’s nothing wrong with admitting you didn’t have all the facts and saying you got it wrong. I try to model that for my grandchildren, too.

As for Ozzy, I bet he laughed. Tell the band in heaven to be warmed up by the time I get there. I want to see that show.