Photo: A day of ceremony in Belmont on Memorial Day 2025

After seemingly weeks of rain and clouds, Memorial Day Monday, 2025, was full of sunshine and warm temperatures. For many, Monday was a harbinger of summer.

Bob Upton, the town’s Veteran Agent and host of the Belmont Memorial Day Ceremony at the Belmont Cemetery on Grove Street, told the assembled, “Memorial Day was a day to remember ancestors, family members, and loved ones who gave the ultimate sacrifice.”

“But now there are some that celebrate the day without more than a casual thought to the purpose and meaning of the day. How do we honor the 1.8 million plus who gave their life for America since 1775? How do we thank them for their sacrifice? Upton believes the town’s Memorial Day ceremony “is one way for all of us here today to remember and honor our fallen heroes.”

Upton recognized Carmela Picone, who hand-washed the 65 veterans’ headstones in the cementery, the Belmont High School student athletes who took their time, in the driving rain, to placed flags at all veterans grave, and the town’s workers who prepared the site for the ceremony.

“That’s where you start. We remember those of Belmont who have served and made the ultimate sacrifice,” said Upton, who pointed out the community’s Gold Star families – the Curtis and Ray families – attending the service.

Elizabeth Dionne, Belmont Select Board chair and the day’s keynote speaker, said the command to “remember” appear more than 550 times in the Old Testament.

“It matters that we remember,” Dionne said. “As fellow Americans, we gather today to remember that it is at the heart of our Memorial Day observances. 2025 is a particularly poignant year, as on April 19 this year, I gathered with other elected officials on Lexington Battle Green to watch a re-enactment of the Battle of Lexington on the 250th anniversary of the day on which eight men were the first to die in defense of their families and their freedoms.”

“Our nation’s history is complex. There have been too many times when we have not extended full citizenship rights to those legally within our borders, yet we strive to exercise tolerance, and expand our tent. We embrace those who love liberty, who dream of contributing to a country where they could be judged, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” Dionne noted. “The US military has been one of the great equalizers in American history, a place where those who serve their country can demonstrate the content of their character.”

Dionne spoke of the Navajo code talkers who served in WWII, creating an unbreakable code that played a crucial role in securing victory for US forces in the Pacific Theater.”

“I read a memoir by Chester Nez, one of the six code talkers. Chester begins his book by stating, ‘I’m no hero. I just wanted to serve my country,’ even though his home state of New Mexico denied Native Americans the vote. Chester volunteered as a Marine in April 1942, a few months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Of that decision, he wrote, ‘I could have stayed in high school. Maybe I should have. But as a warrior, how could I ignore the fact that my country had been attacked’,” she said.

“At the close of his book, Nez writes about what he gained from his military service. ‘My fellow Code Talkers might become part of a new oral and written tradition, a Navajo Victory, with our culture contributing to our country’s defeat of a wily foe’.”

“The story of the code talkers has been told on … the reservation and recorded in the pages of history books forever. Our story is not one of sorrow like the Long Walk and the Great Livestock Massacre, but one of triumph.”

“As Americans, we are often self-critical, keenly aware of when reality falls short of our ideals. In a fallen world populated by imperfect humans, failures are inevitable, and learning from our mistakes is a good thing. But as we remember today, I want to focus on what we get right, on the ideals that motivate us to sacrifice for the common good,” she said.

Sharing her own experiences, Dionne said in June 2018, she visited the Normandy American Cemetery perched on the bluffs above Omaha Beach in France, where the remains of 9,400 US armed forces personnel who participated in the D-Day invasion. Forty-five of those graves contain paired sets of brothers, a memorial wall in the Garden of the Missing includes the names of an additional 1,500 servicemen whose bodies were never found.

“As I walked past rows of crosses interspersed with Stars of David, I read the names of men who had given their lives in the cause of liberty, and I wept. Each name, each set of dates told a story so much youth, so much promise, so much life and love snuffed out.”

Dionne also spoke about her son’s church-sponsored mission to Bolivia, a poor South American country experiencing great civic unrest.

“As his mother, I was worried, but he learned some profound lessons about the privilege of being an American. In one of our weekly phone calls, he said, ‘Mom, people at home criticize America and complain about everything wrong with our country, but everyone here just wants to be there. They would give anything to live in America’.”

“The most important way to honor those living and dead who have served in our nation’s armed forces is to take up our quarrel with the foes of peace and our democratic ideals, and we remember the tremendous privilege we enjoy of being Americans who have the right to vote, to work, to worship freely or not to worship at all, to assemble, to criticize our elected government and to change that government in free and fair elections,” said Dionne.

“Above all, we remember the sacrifices of those who have served in wars and times of war. To you, we say ‘thank you’ and pledge that we will always remember in memory of our fallen dead. I would like to close with the lyrics of the “Mansions of the Lord,” a hymn her church choir sang last week to prepare for Memorial Day,” said Dionne.

To fallen soldiers let us sing
where no rockets fly nor bullets wing
our broken brothers let us bring
To the mansions of the Lord

no more bleeding, no more fight
no prayers pleading through the night
just divine embrace, eternal light
in the mansions of the lord

Where no mothers cry
and no children weep
we shall stand and guard through the angels sleep
while through the ages safely keep
the mansions of the Lord

Upton then recognize Belmont High student, Eva Cohen, who participated in the Voice of Democracy last year, an annual nationwide scholarship program sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW).

“I think is such an important day, especially for our community, because we don’t take that much time in our daily lives to be grateful for everything we have,” said Cohen. “Think about everything that we get to enjoy these days. Think about going to school, voting, or playing in the marching band, and it’s all things to lay their lives down so we can have these things.”

Cohen then joined her fellow Belmont High School Marching Band members as they marching down Grove Street and Bright Road to the Veterans Memorial under a cloudless sky.