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Glover's Marblehead Regiment fired a three-volley salute over the harbor at Clark's Landing on Monday morning, the muskets going off in fog and rain. Moments earlier, State Rep. Jenny Armini had cast a red, white and blue anchor wreath into the water for Marbleheaders who served in the Navy, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine and died at sea. Liz Solange had opened the service with the Navy Hymn, singing beside a Marblehead submarine veterans banner.
Monday's commemoration was the closing act of a four-day observance that had moved through the town since Friday, May 22.
That morning had begun with a veterans breakfast at the Council on Aging, followed by grave flagging at Star of the Sea Cemetery. At the Village School, students in Kate Deeley's 6th grade class staked 1,807 handmade paper poppies — the closing project of a poetry unit on John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields." On Saturday, volunteers flagged graves at Waterside Cemetery. On Sunday, Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Post 2005 held a ceremony at Star of the Sea.
By Monday, every grave had been flagged and every poppy was in the ground.
After the wreath dropped into the harbor, the parade formed near the Old Town House and started up Pleasant Street toward Memorial Park, veterans and service members marching behind American and post flags. Spectators lined the curbs in raincoats. A veteran in a wheelchair raised his hand to a salute as the colors passed; the crowd behind him stood.
At Memorial Park, Roseann Trionfi-Mazzuchelli — Marblehead's veterans agent and an Army veteran — helped lead the ceremony. Select Board Chair Dan Fox read the governor's proclamation declaring May 25 Memorial Day in the Commonwealth. Armini read the honor roll of Marblehead veterans who had died since Veterans Day 2025. John Collins, a Coast Guard Auxiliary member, played taps. The national anthem was sung.
The principal address came from Maria Alejandra Parra-Orlandoni, a former U.S. Navy surface warfare officer who completed two Western Pacific deployments. She spoke about a sailor she called Clay — a gunner's mate from her first ship, later a chief petty officer — who left the service with a clean record and died by suicide about five years ago.
"Still here and OK are not the same thing," she said.
Since 9/11, she told the crowd, roughly four times as many U.S. service members and veterans have died by suicide as were killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Memorial Day, she said, asks the country to honor the fallen. She asked her audience to also hold space for the service members and veterans who are "falling right now."
"The fallen are beyond our reach," she said. "The falling are not. They answered the call, and the least we can do is answer back."
She quoted Walt Whitman, who served as a nurse during the Civil War: "The real war will never get in the books." Marblehead, she said, had been sending its people to war and watching them come back changed — or not watching them come back at all — for 350 years. She traced the town's service history back to Col. John Glover's regiment, and said the American Revolution may have been saved twice by men from Marblehead.
The procession then moved on to Waterside Cemetery, where wreaths waited to be placed for the nation's major conflicts. A Marine in dress uniform set them down in turn.
Ronald Knight, commander of VFW Post 2005, told the crowd there had been uncertainty about the weather. It had been raining at Normandy on D-Day, he said, and "they showed up there." He read from an email he had received from a friend in Ohio, Jeff Crow, who had done three tours in Iraq and four in Afghanistan. For many people, the message said, Memorial Day is a day off — but for veterans, "it's a day that never really ends." It is, the message said, the memory of a voice still heard, a laugh still pictured, a name that does not stop sounding in the heart. Memorial Day, Knight said, is more than hamburgers and hot dogs.
Retired Master Gunnery Sergeant Jason Topp, who served 30 years in the Marine Corps, spoke from a wooden VFW podium in the rain. Knight had asked him to give this year's address, he said. Topp had grown up on Broughton Road, around veterans who were ordinary neighbors most of the year — and then, on Memorial Day, put on uniforms and marched. His grandfather had served in the Dutch army in Indonesia, was taken prisoner by the Japanese and died on the Burma railway; he is buried in Thailand. Topp's mother, then 2½ years old, had been held in a Japanese prison camp until a British patrol liberated her family in 1945.
Marblehead veterans had helped shape his decision to join the Marine Corps, he said — especially Carl Titus, who still marches in the parade. He called Waterside Cemetery and the VFW sacred gathering places for veterans. As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, he asked the town to remember what unifies it.
