It has been three years since Peaches Geldof, the daughter of Paula Yates and Bob Geldof, passed away from a heroin overdose.
Her death shocked the world, not least because the 25-year-old had two young children by husband Thomas Cohen, and seemed to have left her partying days behind.
At just 23, musician Thomas Cohen became a widower. And a single dad of two.
In a recent interview with German newspaper Bild, Thomas has spoken openly about how he feels three years on, and the heartbreaking moment he discovered his dead wife.
“When I found her, I was not surprised. I thought to myself at the moment: ‘Yes of course – you had to do that,'” he told the paper. “What I can remember, it must have been an hour after I’ve found it, that it’s time for the kids’ lunch.”
Peaches and Thomas with their two children, months before her death
In the same interview, Thomas admitted that he fed the children just an hour after finding his wife’s body, after baby Phaedra had been left with his mother’s body for up to eight hours.
“They needed their lunch,” he continued. “So I took the children’s chairs to the table, took the yogurts out of the fridge, the bananas…”
With the help of both his and Peaches’ family, the now 26-year-old has been able to slowly rebuild his life and shared his hopes for his kids.
“I want them to be happy, I don’t care what they end up doing,” he said. “They are miraculously having happy childhoods which hopefully leads to happy fruitful lives.”
In a poignant moment in the interview, Thomas says that the children have now lived longer than they knew their own mother, a fact that is difficult to comprehend.
In the wake of her death, father Bob Geldof, former member of the Boomtown Rats, spoke of his family’s grief: “We are beyond pain. She was the wildest, funniest, cleverest, wittiest and the most bonkers of all of us. Writing ‘was’ destroys me afresh. What a beautiful child. How is this possible that we will not see her again? How is that bearable?”
Husband Tom told an inquest into his wife’s death that he had witnessed Peaches flushing heroin down the toilet that he discovered in the loft, and that he wasn’t aware there was more in the house.
The mum of two had been receiving counselling and drug replacement therapy for over a year, after coming off heroin. The reasons for her return to the drug still remain unknown.
