Musician Thomas Cohen has said that he fell in love with Peaches Geldof on the first day they met and that he refused to become traumatised after her death.
Geldof (25) died of an accidental heroin overdose at the couple's Kent home in 2014, leaving Cohen a 23-year-old widower with two young sons, Astala and Phaedra.
The tragic episode had haunting echoes of her mother, TV presenter Paula Yates, who also died from a heroin overdose 14 years earlier.
Cohen, who is now 25, told The Sunday Times Magazine that he was left devastated at his wife's death and had to learn to love and take care of himself to get through the grieving process.
He said: "I just made the decision to start looking after myself and I refused to lose myself and become a traumatised, grief-stricken single father who everyone's going to look at and think and feel all of these things about. And that's absolutely fine."
Asked if he blames himself at all for her death, Cohen, who has only rarely spoken publicly about his late wife's overdose, said "it's nonsense" to torture himself this way.
He turned to the music of Patti Smith, Mick Jagger and Nick Cave to help him come to terms with his grief, and got back into the studio himself to create his first solo album, Bloom Forever, which is out on May 6.
He also took up transcendental meditation, whose subscribers included George Harrison.
Cohen also revealed that when he met Geldof, it was love at first sight.
"That's what happens when you fall in love with someone. I understand you should be safe and guarded, but when you actually love someone, it happens straight away, doesn't it?"
