Somewhere between one in four and one in five pregnancies in Ireland ends in loss. That means thousands of women in Galway city and county have lost a baby, and most of them have never said so out loud to anyone outside their own family. It is the most common grief we have, and the one we are worst at speaking about.

Melissa Tarpey lost a pregnancy, and in the months afterwards went looking for a room where she could say her baby’s name without watching somebody’s face fall. She couldn’t find one anywhere in the west. Everyone was kind. Nobody knew what to do. So she spent the last while building the room she needed.

On Sunday 20 September, Melissa will be holding the first gathering, Cuimhne — the Irish for remembrance — at An Seomra Yoga on Sea Road.

At the centre of the room there will be a hawthorn bough, cut from her own land in Mayo. Whitethorn is the fairy tree: in Ireland you don’t fell one and you don’t move one, which is why they stand alone in the middle of fields, ploughed around for generations. Each woman writes her baby’s name and ties it to the branch. The bough then travels on to every circle after this one, gathering names as it goes. By next year it will be heavy with the names of children that almost nobody outside their own families has ever said aloud.

“We open with a threshold: an explanation of what will happen, and clear permission to sit in silence, to step out, or to stay only as long as it serves. Ceremonial cacao is then prepared and poured for each woman by hand, as a way of marking that the ordinary day has been set down. From there we move into breath and gentle grounding drawn from my kundalini practice, to settle the body before anything is asked of it. The circle itself is the heart of it. Each woman is invited — never required — to speak a name aloud, or to hold it silently. The names are then written and tied to a hawthorn bough standing at the centre of the room, so that by the end the circle holds every child who was brought into it. We close with a sound bath of gongs, bowls and voice, where nothing at all is asked of anyone, and finish with a final sharing, tea and quiet company rather than an abrupt return to the day. Grief needs its landing time. Nobody is hurried out the door.”