It has been almost three years since the tragic and untimely death of Peaches Geldof, and this week her husband Thomas Cohen has opened up about life with his two sons – without their loving mother.
Musician Thomas, 26, told German newspaper Bild that his sons – five-year-old Astala and four-year-old Phaedra – are ‘miraculously having happy childhoods’ despite losing their mother at such young ages.
“The routine I had to keep up with the children helped me a lot. They have lived longer than they knew their mother. They were just one and two years. Now they are four and five,” he said.
He also cast his mind back to that awful day, and the moment when he found his wife’s body in their home, in Kent. She was just 25 years old at the time, and it was later confirmed that she died of a heroin overdose.
Thomas admitted: “When I found her, I was not surprised. I thought to myself at that moment, ‘Yes, of course – you had to do that.’”
Possibly in shock mode, Thomas also revealed that his first thoughts were of keeping the children in their routine and getting their lunch ready for them.
“What I can remember – it must have been an hour after I found her – that it’s time for the kids’ lunch. They needed their lunch. So I took the children’s chairs to the table, took the yogurts out of the fridge, the bananas,” he added.
Unsurprisingly, Thomas has refrained from speaking to the media about that aspect of his personal life, although he did hint at his struggles after cancelling a number of shows with his band, S.C.U.M, last year.
Thomas made his apologies for the cancellation at the time, admitting to feeling ‘emotionally and mentally unstable’.
In a follow-up interview, he admitted that he needed to take some time out for himself in the wake of the traumatic experience of losing his wife and trying to keep life as normal as possible for his children.
Opening up on the healing process, he later said: “I got to a stage where I thought, ‘I don’t want to stay in this place anymore.’ I’m not disassociating, hiding myself or escaping the reality of the situation. However, I’m not staying based in that trauma.”
“It’s a lot to do with nourishing yourself with the care and love of other people – and seeing that that light was never not there.”
Thomas and Peaches got married in 2012, in the same church where parents Bob and Paula Yates wed.
