The 25-year-old daughter of musician Bob Geldof and Paula Yates posted a picture of herself, as a baby in her mother's arms, to her Instagram account in the early hours of Monday, Sydney time.
It said simply, tenderly, "me and my mum."
Just a day later Peaches Honeyblossom Geldof was found dead by ambulance officers, following a call to police reporting concern for the welfare of a woman at an address near Wrotham, Kent, south-east of London.
"At this stage, the death is being treated as unexplained and sudden," a statement from Kent Police said.
The news came as a shock to Britain's entertainment and fashion circles, where Peaches Geldof had been active as a model, television presenter and fashion writer. She was a frequent attendee at fashion shows and was photographed just last week at a London show for the Tesco brand F&F.
Geldof was the second daughter of musician Bob Geldof and writer and television presenter Paula Yates.
Bob Geldof issued a statement to British media saying his family was "beyond pain".
"She was the wildest, funniest, cleverest, wittiest and the most bonkers of all of us," he said. "What a beautiful child. How is this possible that we will not see her again? How is that bearable?"
The 25-year-old television presenter and model's death is a new tragic chapter in a family story tainted by grief.
Geldof lost her own mother in equally tragic circumstances. Yates died of a drug overdose in 2000, when Geldof was just 11 years old.
Geldof and her siblings - older sister Fifi Trixibelle, younger sister Pixie and younger half-sister Tiger Lily Hutchence Geldof - were raised in the shadow of that tragedy.
Their half-sister Tiger Lily lived with them after the death of both her father, INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, who died in 1997, and Yates.
Geldof had publicly acknowledged that she had not come to terms with her mother's death.
"I remember the day my mother died, and it's still hard to talk about it. I just blocked it out. I went to school the next day because my father's mentality was to keep calm and carry on," she told Elle magazine in 2012.
"I didn't grieve. I didn't cry at her funeral. I couldn't express anything because I was just numb to it all. I didn't start grieving for my mother properly until I was maybe 16."
In an interview with the Guardian in 2009, Geldof acknowledged that she used drugs before but said she had stopped.
"'Yeah, I've taken drugs. Yes, I have had experiences, and a few of those experiences were unsavoury, not ones I want to repeat, but I was growing up. I wanted the experience," she told the paper.
"I wasn't hugely into drugs, and I'm sober now," she added. "I'm not Amy Winehouse. I never have been. I wasn't a crackhead."
Geldof was twice married, first to American musician Max Drummey, and then to British musician Thomas Cohen, with whom she had two children, sons Astala Dylan Willow, born in 2012, and Phaedra Bloom Forever, born in 2013.
Her first marriage, at age 19 to Drummey began at a drive-through chapel in Las Vegas. It lasted six months and ended in 2009.
"My beloved wife Peaches was adored by myself and her two sons Astala and Phaedra, and I shall bring them up with their mother in their hearts every day. We shall love her forever," second husband Cohen said in a statement.
Reaction across Britain was disbelief.
"It's very, very sad. Peaches has overcome a lot in her childhood, seemed to be getting her life together. You hear something like this and words can fail you. It's just tragic, terrible news," Ray Levine, Peaches' former publicist, told Sky News.
"Having to deal with the death of your mother at such a young age would be difficult for any child, let alone someone in the public spotlight. But Peaches overcame that," he said.
It was not easy being the daughter of a famous, wealthy father and she struggled with a turbulent social life. In 2010 she was dropped from a lingerie modelling contract after photographs showing her topless and allegations that she used drugs surfaced.
She was well-known among London's young hip crowd, seen frequently at movie premieres, hot clubs and exclusive concerts.
Bob Geldof, 62, rose to fame in the late 1970s as the lead singer of the Irish punk band The Boomtown Rats. He became an internationally renowned social activist in the 1980s by marshalling the power of his fellow music celebrities, most notably as co-organiser of the 1984 Band-Aid movement and the following year's Live Aid concerts that raised millions for famine relief in Ethiopia.
The fund-raising song he co-wrote, Do they Know It's Christmas? featuring an ensemble of pop stars remains a radio favourite in Britain and Ireland at Christmastime.
In 2005 he helped organise more celebrity-studded concerts under the banner Live 8 — timed to coincide with a G8 summit taking place in Scotland — that raised funds to fight poverty. For the past decade he has worked alongside his fellow Irish rocker Bono at events organised by U2 singer's anti-poverty charity One.
with AP
