Thank you so much for taking the time to reply so thoughtfully and with so much wisdom. I’m just not able to cope with the trauma at the moment but your words give me hope and strength to carry on. The grief has felt overwhelming. I really hope that I’ll be able to pay it forward here too; right now I’m just in pieces and emotionally exhausted. I miss my boys so much. My darling Shaun who died last Saturday was only 3 and so full of life. He was such a vocal fella and the house feels empty without him. He used to nibble my nose when I cuddled him.
The hot weather guide will be very useful thank you. I’m hyper vigilant about it now. We moved in July and the new house is cooler in temperature than our previous place (no carpets either) but even so I need to do everything possible to keep my piggies cool.
What you have said is hugely comforting and I’m so grateful; I’m going to go to bed now and hopefully get some sleep (only for about 5½ hours though)
This is not yet the time for healing but if you can hang on in there, it will eventually come - I promise.
After not losing a single piggy in 27 during the 18 months of the thick of the pandemic and then losing 22 of them in the following 24 months between 15th August 2021- 15th August 2023 has carried me to the edge and at time over it when I stopped being able to grieve at all for a while as the deaths were not neatly spaced out but I lost repeatedly piggies within days of each other; starting with 3 in just a week and a fourth within the month. On 19th December 2022 I came home from having had to pts (put to sleep) an oldie only to find another old lady in the adjoining cage having lost use of her back legs in the meantime. She passed away in the early of hours of the following morning, within less than 24 hours of the first loss. Needless to say that I wasn't feeling exactly in the mood for Christmas that year! And that I very much started to doubt myself as well.
The piggies I have lost in those two years have ranged from a few 8 year olds to losing the same number of 3 year olds to medical issues or to them just dying out of the blue without any warning and any age in between.
I hope that this is going to help you put things into perspective for yourself. You are not a bad owner or person; you are a grieving owner going through one of the most traumatic experiences imagineable. Just focus on hanging on in there.
When I was in hospital with my broken hip and my swollen brain and brain tumour, and once I was able to leave my bed and visit my fellow mates in their beds in the orthopaedic ward with complex breaks that cannot be plastered up, I would spend time chatting with each of the women to find out what mattered most to them in their lives and how they were as personalities. I tried to come up with a crucial connection and an image based on it that they could cling onto whenever their pain became overwhelming, help couldn't arrive soon enough (but often didn't, especially at night) and morphine couldn't kick in fast enough - as something helpful for when I was no longer around to sit with them, hold their hands and just talk with them through the waves of pain; especially during the long nights when the night crew had to mind several wards and was busy with another emergency or two somewhere else.
See what helps you most - holding onto your mother's hand or taking her into your arms (or being taken into her arms) or whether being nibbled on the nose by an affectionate piggy will be the inner rock you can cling to in the middle of the storm you have to currently weather because that connection is the rock your inner strength is resting on.
With another lady who was fighting for her life with a skin infection after a bite who had a disabled daughter it was her inner impressive inner strength and her strong roots she could imagine drawing up strength to keep fighting through her excruciating pain.
For you, my feeling is that your deepest connection is with your mum for finding your very own source of strength and solace. Since this is a very individual thing you have to see whether it works for yourself - it will come to you.
I hope that this will give you some solace but also a way to weather the storm. We never lose those we love and we can always find them again if we start looking. I have my dad and his own determined 3 year battle with terminal cancer at a very similar age to take my strength from and my most special ever piggy, aptly named Minx, to play around with in my mind whenever I need solace or to relax.
Shaun had the loudest voice and the biggest nose nibbles! 
. I’m so sorry for checking back in so late. I had a really busy week at work and I’ve been so tired in the evenings, with my fibromyalgia 
. I miss my boys so much 
. I’m still grieving heavily. Work has distracted me somewhat this week but I feel it’s time I started focusing on getting advice from the CAB etc