The photo that was taken outside Wheeler School’s commencement last week is one of those that doesn’t require any background information. A woman wearing dining service blacks had her arms encircled by a boy wearing a black gown and cap, and her face was contorted into a mixture of grief and joy. You can sense the weight of it even if you don’t know their names. However, once you do, the image becomes more complex rather than simpler.
The young man is Wheeler senior Philip Spradlin, who will be attending Yale in the fall. The woman is 45-year-old Deon Lucas, who has worked behind the lunch counter at the Providence, Rhode Island school for five years. Students refer to her as Miss Deon with a familiarity that is typically reserved for family. After photographer Justin Holland captured the moment and shared it, it quickly spread beyond the Wheeler community, appearing on news aggregators, group chats, and even across continents.
It’s worthwhile to consider why this specific image affected people in the way that it did. This time of year, graduation pictures are all over the place. The majority of them are identical, with parents crying, caps thrown, and the typical choreography. Lucas is neither a parent nor a teacher, so this one deviated from the norm. She’s not performing. Since she is the one who distributes lunch trays, the embrace felt more genuine than most of what is captured on camera at these events.
According to her own account, Lucas spends the majority of her long workday—which runs from seven in the morning until four—being called by name. She told TODAY.com, laughing as she said, “I hear my name all day long: ‘Miss Deon! Miss Deon!'” It sounded like she had said it a thousand times and still meant it. Students have given her notes, drawings, news of college acceptance, and occasionally a difficult day they needed to talk through over the course of five years. The notes are kept at home by her. She said, “I got millions of notes,” which is obviously not literal, but it’s the kind of exaggeration that reveals a truth.
In the way people responded to this picture, there is a subtle but persistent argument that schools are run by adults that is not included in the brochure. It makes sense that teachers receive the credit since they are in charge of curriculum development, mentoring, and grading. However, a different kind of relationship—one based on repetition rather than instruction—is absorbed by those who work in cafeterias, front offices, and hallways. “It’s nice to have adults on campus who aren’t grading you,” said Spradlin, who has been a Wheeler student since sixth grade. It seems that this distinction is more important than it should be.
It’s difficult to ignore how frequently these kinds of stories recur—a janitor remembered at a funeral, a bus driver invited to a wedding, a lunch worker hugged at graduation—and how each time it momentarily rearranges what people find noteworthy. Perhaps this is due to the fact that most of us grew up with a version of Miss Deon but never expressed it aloud.
When you look at the picture again, Lucas’ description of graduation as bittersweet seems like an understatement. She said, “It’s going to be sad not seeing a lot of the seniors,” but there was no performance in that statement; it was just someone mentioning a loss that occurs every June and doesn’t seem to get any easier.
One hug was captured in the picture. Lucas said there were dozens more that day, unphotographed, just out of the frame, and probably just as real. To be honest, it’s not the viral image itself that sticks in people’s minds the most; rather, it’s the idea of similar events occurring just beyond the camera’s field of view, the more subdued farewells that no one will ever see scroll past on a timeline.
