A legacy of grief that goes on and on: Peaches Geldof could never get over her mother's death... and 14 years later, her children are facing the same sorrow

• Before descent into drug abuse, Paula Yates aspired to be good mother
• She later turned into 'heartbroken shell of woman' after partner's death
• Peaches was left with gaping hole in life when mother died from overdose
• Fast forward 14 years, her children will now inherit same legacy of sorrow

Before her devastating descent into drug and alcohol abuse, Paula Yates’s abiding concern was to be a good mother to her four young children. In fact, the row that led up to the death of her partner, Michael Hutchence, was about her kids.
She wanted to take them to Australia to spend time as a family at Christmas. Her estranged husband, Bob Geldof, was having none of it, rightly concerned about Hutchence’s wild sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.
Hutchence hanged himself and, in despair, Paula spiralled out of control, dying from a heroin overdose three years later, when Peaches was just 11.

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Dedicated: Before her devastating descent into drug and alcohol abuse, Paula Yates's abiding concern was to be a good mother to her four young children. Above, Paula is pictured with her daughter, Peaches Geldof

One can only imagine how terrible those years must have been for her children, as their mother battled her addictions and her grief, even clutching her dead lover’s ashes in a pillow to her breast each night.
As Peaches would later recall: ‘My mother, who was amazing, who wrote books on parenting, who gave us this idyllic childhood in Kent . . . turned into this heartbroken shell of a woman who was just medicating to get through the day.’

 

Small wonder that Peaches said she could never get over her mother’s death. Even after the birth of her own two beautiful boys — Astala, almost two, and Phaedra, 11 months — the absence of her mother left a gaping hole in her life.
Fast forward 14 years and, with unbearable poignancy, her children will now inherit that same legacy of sorrow. For it is perhaps the greatest tragedy of Peaches’s sudden death that it has condemned her sons to grow up without a mother’s love, just as she was obliged to herself.

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Life of sorrow: Even after Peaches had her own two beautiful boys - Astala (right), almost two, and Phaedra (left), 11 months - the absence of her mother left a gaping hole in her life. She never got over her mother's death

Whatever the cause of her death, that is surely the last thing Peaches would have wanted. For while she had undoubtedly made many mistakes in her life, the former wild child had finally left her rock ’n’ roll lifestyle behind to concentrate on being the best mother she could be.
She was happily married and had set up a country idyll for her children, posting pictures of them with the family dog, eating mashed potato, larking around, and doing all the things toddlers do.
She had even started writing for Mother & Baby magazine, just as Paula had written books about the joy of being a stay-at-home mum in the years before she met Hutchence.

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Happier times: Fast forward 14 years and, with unbearable poignancy, Peaches's children will now inherit that same legacy of sorrow. Above, the model and journalist is pictured with her sons and husband, Thomas Cohen

One of the last images Peaches posted on Twitter was of her boys’ Easter display, with homemade cards, daffodils, and chocolate eggs that now will never be eaten.
Yet, in a curious way, Peaches’s life mirrored her mother’s in reverse.
While Paula was the doting mother who only descended into drug abuse in later life, Peaches was immersed in that world from a terrifyingly young age. In 2008, aged 19, she was filmed buying drugs from a dealer in a seedy East London flat.
Later that year, Peaches stopped breathing for several minutes after a suspected heroin overdose. She refused to go to hospital in case her father found out.

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Former couple: Paula Yates is pictured with her ex-partner, Michael Hutchence, who later hanged himself

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Happy family: Paula is seen here with her ex-husband Sir Bob Geldof and three children at EuroDisney in 1992

She dismissed it as ‘a bad experience’ and ‘something people go through, especially growing up in London’. She told one interviewer: ‘You have to live on the edge as the edge is where you find out who you are.’
One of her lovers even blogged about their sex sessions, enhanced by injecting ‘lemon heroin’ and, in 2011, there were pictures of her in a five-in-a-bed sex session. Again, she collapsed, this time in her North London home, in ‘respiratory arrest’.

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Changed woman: After having a family and moving to the country, Peaches grew up at last

That all changed when she married Tom Cohen, had a family and moved to the country. Peaches, by all accounts, had grown up at last, becoming a contented, considerate young woman.
But who knows what deadly toll the years of abuse took on her young body. Recently, she appeared painfully and dangerously thin, thanks to the juice-only diets that helped her lose weight.
Being a new mum can be draining for a young woman at the best of times — all the more so without her own mother on hand to lend advice and support — and Peaches increasingly sought friendship from her 200,000 Twitter followers, with whom she discussed exhaustion, her baby’s teething troubles and her domestic struggles.
Ultimately, though, the platitudes and vacuities of the Twittersphere are no substitute for true support in life any more than they are in death, as strangers and hangers-on now rush to tweet their personal devastation.
Sharon Osbourne, Alan Sugar, Boris Becker, Phillip Schofield, Coleen Rooney, Myleene Klass, Alexandra Burke — they were all at it on Monday, in a predictable show of public mourning.
How much more meaningful if they’d sent a private letter to her father or husband, rather than a shallow, self-aggrandising tweet, wallowing in the wave of collective hysteria.
It wasn’t the approval of strangers that Peaches needed, it was a mother’s unconditional love. A love that she pledged she would give to her own children for ever.
As she wrote for Baby & Mother a month ago: ‘After years of struggling to know myself, lost at sea, rudderless and troubled . . . I felt finally anchored in place, with lives that literally depend on me, and I am not about to let them down, not for anyone or anything.’
One can only hope it will be some solace for those two baby boys as they grow up to know that, unlike their grandmother Paula, Peaches seemed to have left her dark days behind her and was focused on giving them the love and stability of ‘a mummy and daddy together for ever’. If only.