Editor’s note: This story contains wide-ranging and frank discussion on the topics of death by suicide and assisted suicide. If you are in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
It was a chilly day in late March when Thomas Macaulay sat down in his Aspen Court home to speak with the News, whom he had invited there to talk about his wife, the late Ardis Macaulay. Looking out into a gray sky through a large window near his dining table, he mused briefly on his life with Ardis.
“I spent over 60 years with her, and you can’t really put that into words — but she was a dynamo,” Thomas Macaulay said.
The day the News spoke with him was almost a year to the day after Ardis Macaulay’s death. Very early on the morning of March 28, 2024, Ardis chose to die on her own terms, with her husband present.
Thomas Macaulay was aware of his wife’s decision to die — but he told the News he did not know that, within a few months of Ardis’ death, he would be charged, tried, convicted and sentenced for assisted suicide. He didn’t know, when Ardis made her decision, that assisting someone in their choice to die is illegal in the state of Ohio.
He invited the News to speak with him about his wife’s death, and the aftermath, in the hope that others might learn from his experiences — and not “the hard way,” as he did.
At the center of his experience was Ardis — a vibrant artist and educator who developed physical pain that wouldn’t go away.
For most of her 75 years of life, Ardis Macaulay was a creator — and a highly prolific one. She produced hundreds, if not thousands, of drawings, paintings, poems and more — enough to fill the Macaulay home and still have plenty left to give away after she died.
She was well-known for her creation of mandalas — circular drawings with cultural roots in Hindu and Buddhist practices. Drawn to the work of psychologist Carl Jung, who incorporated mandalas into his own research into the ideas of self-examination and the “collective unconscious,” Ardis began to explore Jung’s mandala techniques in the 1970s.
“It did not disappoint,” she wrote of her mandala exploration in a 2022 professional resume. “I was amazed by the sense of inner knowing that emerged from this endeavor. Working within the circle format soon became my passion.”
With degrees in visual art and art therapy, Ardis Macaulay became an educator, teaching Montessori and junior high schools and, later, in Tecumseh and Bethel high schools. She left teaching for a while to work as an art therapist at Dartmouth Psychiatric and Kettering hospitals, but later returned to teaching art at Mechanicsburg High School, from which she retired. She incorporated elements of her therapeutic art practice into her teaching, and Thomas Macaulay said the art curricula she provided to her students were robust.
“She had drawing and painting, of course, and then printmaking and sculpture and photography, clay and ceramics,” he said. “She was always striving to be the best art teacher possible.”
The Macaulays moved to Yellow Springs in 2018, and brought with them a number of plants from their former, larger home in Miami County. Ardis was looking for a place to rehome some of her plants — and she found it at the yoga studio House of AUM, which was, at the time, located in a Kings Yard building replete with large, sun-filled windows.
That’s how Ardis Macaulay began a friendship with local resident and House of AUM owner, Melissa Herzog, who is now the executor of Ardis’ considerable artistic estate. In 2020, Herzog said, Ardis donated more than 100 of her paintings to the studio, with sales from the art to help benefit House of AUM as it navigated the pandemic.
“Her art is very spiritual — they’re like transmissions in themselves,” Herzog said. “So people that were coming in really gravitated towards her work and were her audience.”
Thomas Macaulay said Ardis began experiencing pain and sleeplessness in early 2024 after being prescribed lorazepam — a benzodiazepine often taken for anxiety — and then being abruptly taken off the medication by a doctor. After researching her symptoms, Ardis concluded she was experiencing protracted benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome, which some studies suggest can affect around 10% of those who stop taking benzodiazepines and can result in chronic pain and sleeplessness for weeks, months or even years.
Ardis Macaulay saw a number of doctors, including a neurologist, as she battled her ongoing pains, which her husband said left a burning sensation that would come and go.
“It was all over her body at different times; it would move all over,” he said. “Her neurological system was just shot.”
When Ardis received no relief via traditional medicine, Thomas Macaulay said she looked to other practices for any method that might help, trying myofascial release, acupuncture, massage and reiki.
“I mean, you name it — we were trying everything,” he said.
Ardis did gain some limited respite from these practices, but it didn’t last. At the same time, she was still sleepless, often for days at a time.
“She felt like her body was so out of control, and feared that she was going to lose her mind, too,” Herzog said. “She was desperately trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together, to try to figure out how to manage her pain, and to be able to sleep — if she could just sleep.”
Thomas Macaulay added: “Sleep deprivation is a kind of torture — and she was feeling tortured.”
After a few months with no answers — and, she felt, no options — Thomas Macaulay said Ardis made a decision.
“Our son came to visit [from Costa Rica], and then after he left, I think she became more convinced that suicide was going to be the only answer,” he said.
Ardis Macaulay planned to die via asphyxiation, aided by the use of liquid nitrogen. Because she was too ill to do so herself, Thomas Macaulay quietly purchased the nitrogen for her.
“I didn’t want to involve anyone else — but I didn’t know what I was doing was illegal,” he said.
Ardis prepared for her death with rigorous research into her chosen method, and wrote several letters in her own hand that explained clearly her medical issues, her choice to die and that her husband had purchased the nitrogen on her behalf because she could not do it herself. These documents were intended to be handed to law enforcement authorities who would doubtlessly respond in the wake of her death.
In the predawn hours of March 28, Ardis awoke Thomas and told him it was time. He watched as she carried out the procedure and described the sensations she was feeling, then became quiet and still. Thomas Macaulay waited, he said, about 20 minutes — and then he called the police.
“That’s when all hell broke loose — and that’s what she didn’t want to have happen,” he said.
It’s not illegal to die by suicide in Ohio, but the state is not one of the 10 — plus Washington, D.C. — that has a law on the books that permits aid in dying. It’s a third-degree felony in Ohio to assist a person in dying by suicide, according to ORC 3795.04 — and suicide deaths are investigated by responding law enforcement.
The YS Police Department responded to Thomas Macaulay’s call a little after 3 a.m., and were later accompanied by Miami Township Fire-Rescue.
“Death investigations follow a very specific process, no matter the type of death,” YSPD Chief Paige Burge told the News. “As investigators, we treat every death as a homicide until proven otherwise — that’s the safest thing to do.”
In cases where a person’s cause of death can’t immediately be determined, investigation is handed over to the Greene County Coroner’s Office, Burge added — and though Thomas Macaulay made it clear that Ardis had died by suicide, Burge said that was up to the coroner to confirm.
“In this circumstance, we did have specific details from Mr. Macaulay, and he essentially asked if we could hold off, because it had been a long night before we came by,” Burge said. “Unfortunately, that’s not how things work.”
She added that it’s “not uncommon for [YSPD officers] to use discretion” in their policing around nonviolent offenses, such as traffic stops and minor misdemeanors — but that discretion stops at felonies.
“When we start getting into the territory of felonious crimes — no matter the nature — we try and stay within the letter of the law as opposed to the spirit of the law,” she said.
Thomas Macaulay was indicted in June for two third-degree felony counts of assisted suicide: “providing the physical means by which the other person commits or attempts to commit suicide” and “participating in a physical act by which the other person commits or attempts to commit suicide.”
Though Thomas Macaulay maintained that he did not participate in physically aiding his wife in her death, he pleaded guilty to both counts; the second count was dismissed at trial in September 2024. In November, he was sentenced to five years probation; in December, his probation was terminated in full and all associated filing, processing and supervision fees were waived.
“It just went away,” Thomas Macaulay said. “It was basically swept under the rug — which should have been done originally.”
Greene County Prosecuting Attorney David Hayes, who provided an email statement to the News this month, wrote that, in his 23 years with the Prosecutor’s Office, Thomas Macaulay’s was the first assisted suicide case to be tried in Greene County’s courts.
“In deciding what to recommend, the State considered that the defendant was 77 years old, he had no criminal history whatsoever and did not carry a presumption that the defendant be incarcerated,” Hayes wrote. “In addition, the defendant did not, in my view, represent a danger to society. Setting my personal feelings aside, I believe that the State’s recommendation was the right one based on the facts of the case.”
Hayes added that, personally, he is “vehemently opposed to assisted suicide,” but that “end of life issues are intensely personal and are fraught with strong emotions and what seem like impossible choices.”
“As a human being, I am sympathetic to that reality. As the Greene County Prosecuting Attorney, however, I have a responsibility to follow the law and prosecute those who break it.”
Thomas Macaulay said he was distraught over the events that followed his wife’s death; he said the home he and Ardis shared for six years was filled with several police officers and sheriff’s deputies less than an hour after she died.
“I don’t know why they needed all those people in here looking at my dead wife,” he said. “It just seemed really disrespectful to me — to the dead.”
But what really stings, he said, is Ardis Macaulay’s death certificate, which was filed Oct. 1, 2024. It lists the manner of death as “homicide,” and describes it as “at the hands of another.”
“That’s the way it’s going to be forever — that she died by homicide,” he said.
The News reached out to the Greene County Coroner’s Office for clarity on the death certificate, but did not receive a response by press time.
Thomas Macaulay said he understands that death by suicide is a complex topic, as is the way it affects those who consider it and the people around them. He believes that suicide should be prevented when it comes to younger people, whom he believes turn to it “because of a mental wound of some kind that, in time, could heal if the suicide was prevented.”
“On the other hand,” he added, “I believe that most older individuals commit suicide because of a physical wound of some kind, that in time only gets progressively worse, in spite of modern medicine.”
He said he wishes the law in Ohio reflected this belief, as in states with “Death with Dignity” laws that make allowances for medical aid in dying, typically via medication and with the oversight of a physician. Medical aid in dying eligibility in participating states is, at present, only extended to those 18 and older who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Most states also impose a residency requirement, with the exception of Oregon and Vermont.
Crucially, the aid of an attending physician in “Death with Dignity” states means loved ones of those who are eligible won’t be at risk of criminal activity, because they won’t be called on to help.
“What the [Ohio] Legislature has come up with is that it’s not illegal to kill yourself, and if you try and fail, there’s no punishment,” he said. “But if you help someone kill themselves, prison can be the result. It just seems so ridiculous.”
He added: “I wonder how many handgun suicides there have been in Yellow Springs, with the gun registered to another person, that have gone uncharged as assisted suicide?”
Thomas Macaulay said Ardis asked him, just before her death, why he wasn’t trying to talk her out of dying.
“And I said, ‘That would be the most selfish thing I could think of,’” he said. “If someone can’t stand to be here, why would you want to ask them to endure that some more?”
Ardis Macaulay’s life was celebrated in Yellow Springs last summer, with those attending invited to choose from a selection of Ardis’ many, many works of art to take home with them. It was one of her expressed wishes, which she communicated in a letter — that none of her art be thrown away. Thomas Macaulay said he plans to hold another such gathering this August, inviting Ardis’ former Mechanicsburg High School students to attend.
At the end of this year, Thomas Macaulay plans to move to Costa Rica; his and Ardis’ son, Ian, lives there with his wife and child and operates a permaculture homestead, Finca Tierra, in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca. Near Finca Tierra, Ardis’ ashes now rest under a large tree.
“There’s a smaller tree next to it, which I guess is going to become my tree,” Thomas Macaulay said. “That’s where my ashes are going to be.”
75 years ago: 1950
Mrs. Charity Brown Dies. “Born a Slave, the daughter of Samuel and Eliza Williams, Mrs. Brown estimated her age from the fact that she was big enough to ‘shoo flies’ off the dining table at the time of the end of the Civil War, and concluded that she was probably born in 1860.”
200 Archers Shoot in Glen Helen Meet. “More than 180 archers braved threatening weather Sunday to compete in the Yellow Springs Archery Club’s annual rover meet in Glen Helen. Bowmen and bowwomen from Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky and Florida were in attendance.”
Telephone count jumps. “A big increase in local phone service since V-J Day in 1945 was noted by Ohio Bell Telephone Co … as the company delivered its annual phone book last week and this. The Yellow Springs exchange now has 1,280 phones instead of the 745 it possessed at that time. The Clifton exchange has 161 phones listed in the new book.”
Planning for new schools. “An unofficial census of Yellow Springs shows an increase of 37 percent in the population since the 1940 census. It reveals a population of 2,249 here. The count [was] taken in January and February by members of an Antioch College statistics class … to determine the number of pre-school children in Yellow Springs. … The students decided they might as well count the entire population of Yellow Springs while they were about it. … The survey found 354 children under school age.”
50 years ago: 1975
Glen Garden Plots for Rent. “About 15 50 x100 foot garden plots are available to local residents in Glen Helen in the field west of the entrance to the Yellow Spring [off Route 343]. A $15 fee will be charged.”
Blood tests for Co-op Members. “Members of the Yellow Springs Better Health Cooperative will have blood samples taken Sunday, 8 a.m.–1 p.m. and Monday 8–11 a.m. Monday at Bryan Center. Results of the ensuing blood tests will be explained at a May 21 meeting. This is the first of regular blood tests for Health Co-op members, to be given at six month intervals.”
Bushworks to Open. “Former Yellow Springs residents Chelsie and Pete Bush will open their shop, ‘The Bushworks,’ tomorrow. The shop is located at 144 Cliff St., next to the Lumber Co. Their services will include welding, repair, custom fabrication and a wide variety of metal work. They will be joined later this month by their brother John, who will provide furniture repair, refinishing and fabrication services.”
Covered Bridge to Be Moved to Glen. “The Caesar’s Creek covered bridge will soon be on its way to a new home in the South Glen, where it will span the Yellow Springs Creek below Grinnell Road. … A contract was signed Thursday … to move a 60-foot-long section from the center of the 124-foot bridge.”
25 years ago: 2000
Organic Grocery sold. “A favorite local business has changed ownership. Stacy Arnett, who owned the Organic Grocery for ten years, sold the business last week to his employee Maria Thornton-Bunkley. … The store was first opened in the late 1960’s, according to Arnett. He moved the business from 225 Xenia Avenue to its present location at 230 Kieth’s Alley in 1994.”
Glass Farm. “Council approved a resolution, 3–2, forming a partnership with Home, Inc., a community land trust (CLT), making the group responsible for coming up with a plan to develop affordable housing on the eastern third of the Village-owned Glass Farm on King Street.”
Manager resigns. “Village Manager David Heckler resigned as the Village’s top administrator, after 15 years of public service. Village Manager for the last four years, Heckler has accepted a position with Tri-Cities North Regional Wastewater Authority, where he’ll serve as general manager. … Heckler started with the Village in 1985 as assistant Village manager.”
Clover Buddies. “A new 4-H Clover Bud group is being formed in the Yellow Springs area. Open to children ages 5-8, the group will be named Clover Buddies and will meet once a month for a group session which will focus on craft projects, gardening and/or personal growth. The group will also meet once a month for a field trip to see local farms and visit other Greene County points of interest or to perform community service. … Call Beth Bridgeman … or Jessica Wyatt.”
Ten years ago: 2015
Water plant to include softening. “The need to provide softening became clear following a meeting between Village staff and the largest water users in the village, during which all reported that they spend a significant amount softening local water. … The large users, including YSI/Xylem, Antioch College and the Yellow Springs Brewery, all urged Council to add a water softening component to the new plant.”
Women help women, quietly. “When Moya Shea received an unexpected medical bill from a clinic a few years ago for a procedure she thought was covered by insurance, she was startled. Quite ill at the time, she turned to a local group for help. Not only did the Feminist Health Fund of Yellow Springs agree to pay Shea’s bill but the group’s board members told her how to negotiate to have it cut in half. … Founded in 1980, the Feminist Health Fund raises money from the community and disperses it to needy women suffering from a catastrophic illness.”
Bats crack at Gaunt Park. “The sounds of baseball echoed from the newly-renovated fields at Gaunt Park this week as the Yellow Springs High School boys baseball team opened its 2015 season. Returning for the third year are head coach Ben Cooper and pitching coach Mitch Clark. Hitting coach Kelly Dunn is new to the coaching staff and Ed Amrhein is helping as a roving scout.”
High-speed internet as Village utility. “Like electricity and water, the Internet has become a utility, say community members who are urging Village leaders to construct a fiber optic network that would provide high-speed Internet access for the entire town. As part of that initiative supporters will host a ‘Fiber Forum’ at the MVECA Data Center.”
Slovenian violinist Miha Pogačnik will perform Thursday, May 1, at the Herndon Gallery at Antioch College, bringing his unique blend of music, social engagement and innovation to Yellow Springs.
The concert is a benefit for Chamber Music in Yellow Springs, which brings world-renowned and emerging chamber music artists to perform for village and area audiences annually.
Pogačnik told the News in a recent interview that he trained as a classical violinist at University of Cologne in Germany and toured as a Fulbright Scholar of IU Bloomington.
However, he added, he knew early on in his career that there was “more to the world than just to play the violin.”
“If you are good enough, then you are a performer, an entertainer, more or less — and I was, at heart, always an entrepreneur.”
This realization, Pogačnik said, led him to shift his focus — particularly after he performed in France’s Chartres Cathedral in 1980. The acoustic resonance of the centuries-old Gothic cathedral was so extraordinary, he said, that he was “positively knocked out” by the interplay between the “violin, a micro instrument” and the “macro instrument, which was the whole cathedral.”
Pogačnik decided to create a festival held at Chartres, which he organized for three years, and which featured both musical performances and lectures on “the deeper meaning of music within context of everything else,” he said. The festivals grew a dedicated audience — one that Pogačnik said was “really willing to experiment.”
“So from there, I took off with a social innovation which had never happened before,” he said. “Namely, I invited my audience to go other places with me.”
He dubbed the new idea the “IDRIART” movement, in which he and audiences would travel via caravan to European countries experiencing crisis, interacting with local communities and aiming to affect social change.
“I chose places where there had been war, or were just before war, or anything else which was critical, and I would bring hundreds of people — thousands, in some cases — with me,” he said. “By the beginning of 2000 I had done more than 200 festivals like that all over the world.”
But Pogačnik’s appetite for experimentation had not yet been sated. He had found, he said, that the blend of music performance and social interaction was a powerful tool — and it was one he could use on an entirely different stage.
“I started working with companies and corporations — which was a completely new concept — to learn to use musical masterpieces as a basis to unlock people’s potential,” he said. “Usually people only get a lot of PowerPoint — and there’s not much power in a PowerPoint, but I have a method to help people forget about their routines and how they look at the world, and make what I call a ‘creative detour.’”
Pogačnik calls his method the “Miha Method,” which encourages participants to create and perform together. He said the method lifts up a class of workers who are “usually caught up in horrible, top-down oppression.”
“These people need rescuing,” he said. “They all have unique talents that need to be enabled, and when I do my sessions, I take them out of their oppressive world. … Of course, on Monday, they are again doing the old stuff — but something has now taken place that does not leave. They now have tools — ‘soul tools,’ one could say.”
When it comes to performances for an audience like the one he’ll encounter in Yellow Springs, Pogačnik takes a similar approach, he said, by subverting both expectations and the traditional roles inherent in performance spaces. He said he aims to break down the “dualism” of performer and audience, of “stage and auditorium,” interacting with those gathered to create a kind of performance-as-workshop.
One of the guiding principles of his work, he said, is a belief that the aim of music, and all forms of art, is to move people — not just emotionally, but in new, sometimes unexpected, directions.
“If you go to a beautiful concert, you are moved, and that’s good enough — and that’s important and should not be taken down,” he said. “But for me, it’s the beginning, not the end — when people are moved, that should be the starting point to something.”
Pogačnik said he values authenticity and genuine connection while interacting with the folks he leads in workshops or performances. It’s one of the reasons he tends not to use a script of any kind when he’s presenting, preferring to react as he learns about the people who have gathered to hear him, addressing them out of his “direct intuition and not something fixed.”
In doing so, he said he hopes to inspire people to discover their own “world beyond.”
“The materialism in which we live heavily relies on the outer appearance, but it’s the inner world that makes all the difference,” he said. “That’s where the sources are — for renewal, for discovery, for creativity, for complete transformation in life and in society. … Being all the time in a position to reinvent yourself — that is where living happens.”
The violinist said that, on a larger scale, he hopes his work will help reposition art within society as something beyond entertainment — “You can’t entertain yourself to death; you have to find some serious moments in life,” he said — and with real, meaningful power for change. He pointed to political negotiations, for example — arenas in which most of those involved already have their minds fixed on a solution before they even arrive.
“But imagine if I would appear there and take them to music, and maybe something would happen that was absolutely not decided upon before,” he said. “Art should be there to invite the unexpectable, to invite the unusual.”
Pogačnik said he looks forward to meeting villagers who come out for the benefit event. Born and raised, as he was, in Slovenia, he said Ohio — which has a large Slovenian population — holds a certain home-feel.
“In Slovenia, they say, ‘What’s the biggest town in Slovenia? Cleveland, Ohio!’” he said, laughing.
Pogaˇcnik will perform for the benefit of Chamber Music in Yellow Springs Thursday, May 1, beginning at 6:30 p.m., in Herndon Gallery at Antioch College. Tickets are $40, and may be purchased online at http://www.cmys.org.
By Jane Blakelock
She’s back, and that’s great news for author Jo Ann Kiser’s fans and new readers. In “Sunday People” — her second novel and third book in less than four years — Kiser marries the pleasures of her short stories and longer narratives. As in her 2022 story collection, “The Guitar Player and Other Songs of Exile,” story arcs are independent. And as in 2023’s “A Young Woman from the Provinces,” Kiser illustrates more fully, more clearly, cultures of Eastern Kentucky and its environs. This time, a new cast of Osierville residents gather for a wedding uniting the niece and nephew of respective aunts with a conflicted past.
The event launches seven eponymous chapters whose accounts’ whole surpasses their simpler sum. Stories interpolate as readers recall prior retellings. The wedding takes place in a church that is a reincarnation of a reincarnation of an old time, rough-hewn Baptist structure. Kiser interrogates religious beliefs here, just as she does in her other books. Intent and charitable spirit are given the nod, with orthodoxy coincidental.
On Sarvis Mountain, as everywhere, stories tightly bound together remain each teller’s own. Eastern Kentucky’s parochial and progressive characters honor and defy stereotype, living interesting, human lives.
For Orson Caskill, a local merchant whose philosophies sharpen as his health wanes, religion is his favorite secluded pond, part of a legacy he wishes to entrust to the right person, while securing a couple last wishes. Then there is his friendship with Fergus, an otherwise friendless (with good reason) friend. Unfortunately, Fergus’s attachment to Orson carries with it a regrettable taint. Both aggravating and tender, Orson has clear insights about his family and himself. His favorite psalm ends, “I have loved the snare.”
Darcy, another complicated character, has a mostly gratifying and meaningful relationship with Orson’s granddaughter Melissa. Fleeting gestures belie Darcy’s conflicted emotions toward Orson, marked by his wife, Sarah Beth. Darcy works hard to want and appreciate what she has become, which is considerable, but gladly visits from Chicago to share in her sister’s Sarvis Mountain life. She is an insider and an outsider at the same time. Her hidden past includes one clear involvement that puts beyond all doubt that Darcy, too, loves — or at least has loved — the snare, and is partly caught in it for life.
Fergus loves the snare most of all, and in the eyes of many readers will remain irredeemable. His suffering at the hands of family yanks hard on Orson’s compassionate decency and imprints him as an instant savior to Fergus. He gives Orson plausible deniability of the worst of his crimes and dark personal offenses, but the reader has no such cover.
Sarah Beth’s long-standing family history includes respected clergy and Union and Revolutionary war heroes; she exerts a Ruth-like reverence for husband Orson’s and others’ histories. Archiving her family’s well-established accomplishments, she has made the colloquial a bible whose realms she rarely transgresses yet draws from broadly and effectively. Her manifold wisdom ensnares Orson’s lifelong affection; in turn, his needs and legacy circumscribe her life’s goals.
That Orson’s daughter Charlene’s affliction includes hearing voices fits with her essential talent for listening. She interprets exchanges with her spouse, Bob, without sentimentality. She attends to her two sons, who view her quite differently, perceptively. Charlene overhears parental disagreements and shares keenly inflected, longer dialogue among friends. She cannot herself choose the paths taken by her stalwart mother and her sibling, the “perfect” Tessie. Charlene does not wish to disentangle from her growth beyond the familiar past.
Jeff Caskill has his guitar, his work in his father’s store, and his insular love of an insulated life, but he is powerless to hem in his wife and daughter. Jeff works out his own legacy, his own sculpting of a life where he sacrifices his comfort zone, but never his general compass of allegiances. He gently notes that his wife, Bernice, has taught him “all [he knows] of Renoir.” Indeed, it is again, winsomely, women who seek out “book learning” and herald the love of art and culture, navigating and bringing a wider world back to the mountain.
In the final chapter, Melissa Caskill journals about Adam and Eve’s “seed of nostalgia when God cast them out of the garden,” and in time endures her own casting out. She is the next generation, and we watch her mature. She’s a little bit rock and roll in her new synthesis of all of it, from her father Jeff’s “magic circle” of Eastern Kentucky, to pain that shatters promising young lives, to finding persistent beauty and truth among a family’s shared realities. Melissa Caskill’s journey resonates as readers recognize how crucially the past exerts enduring influence on the future.
By Cyraina Johnson-Roullier
It’s been a while since I last engaged with you, but as I’ve been navigating this unexpected hiatus, I’ve been paying attention to significant issues of potential interest to us, one of which has been unfolding just eight miles away. This is the particular circumstance of the Haitian immigrants still living in Springfield, Ohio. With the Monday, March 31, 2025, ruling of a California federal judge delaying the removal of Temporary Protected Status for approximately 350,000 Venezuelans, the same may yet happen for the roughly 500,000 Haitians — including those living in Springfield — who have been added to the case, on which the judge has not yet ruled.
Haitians have continued to be targeted in the U.S., now in a much more serious way than something like last year’s outlandish accusation, made during the 2024 election campaign, that law-abiding Haitians living legally in Springfield were eating people’s pets. Springfield’s Haitians have been living legally in the United States under the same Temporary Protected Status designation as have Venezuelans. While TPS doesn’t provide a pathway to citizenship, it can be renewed if, after review, certain conditions concerning natural disaster or violence are met. But as was announced last month by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, TPS has been rescinded for all Haitians, who were given a new deadline of Aug. 3, 2025, by which time they will need to have left the United States. Though this action builds on President Trump’s debunked accusations from last year, it also makes one of his 2024 presidential campaign promises a grim reality — that if reelected, he would revoke the TPS that legalized these immigrants.
However, and as many have noted since that campaign promise, this issue is not just about immigration, but about community, and just how much these immigrants have brought to that of Springfield. But amid the flurry of incendiary responses to President Trump’s false allegations last year, one voice rose above the noise to plead the immigrants’ case: that of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who tried, in a New York Times guest essay, to bring a calm, steadying and above all, human, voice to the issue, one solidly based in reality. Speaking to a part of that essay’s title, “Here is the Truth About Springfield,” Gov. DeWine revealed that though he was born in Springfield, he and his wife, Fran, “have lived our entire lives in Yellow Springs.” Yet in focusing on the Springfield he has known all his life, it’s actually what Gov. DeWine didn’t say about Yellow Springs, which is where he actually grew up, that more explicitly brings home the point he sought to make about Springfield: that it is community itself — not whether or not some of those who make up that community are immigrants, or Haitian, or anything else — that is most important.
Growing up as I did just down the street from Gov. DeWine’s family home, I share with him (as well as many of you) the very special experience of community that comes from having spent my formative years in the village. Though Yellow Springs is a much smaller community than Springfield, the village as I knew it in the ’70s and ’80s was extremely tight-knit, with a very strong culture of shared values stretching across multiple generations, religions, nationalities, races, classes, languages and every other kind of difference anyone could imagine.
At that time, DeWine’s Pond, on the grounds of Gov. DeWine’s family home, was a community magnet — everyone, no matter our many differences, was welcomed there, to skate together on the winter ice, or to visit the ducks, swans and geese who made it their home in warmer months. On scorching Ohio summer days, I often rode my bicycle down the long drive through the grounds to the home itself, to ask Mrs. DeWine — Gov. DeWine’s mother — for permission to climb the fence in order to approach those ducks, swans and geese, and she would always kindly reply, “Yes, certainly, but don’t go too close to the water!” I learned there that a duck is afraid of you, but that a swan is beautiful yet mean, and will bite if you get too close. Of such community magnets, we shared many, some of which still exist — there was a weekly community folk dance on Friday nights, featuring dances from cultures everywhere in the world, which all could learn and dance together with others; Glen Helen; John Bryan State Park; Gaunt Park and its Fourth of July celebration in addition to the community swimming pool in summer and long, cold days sledding down its hill in winter; the Street Fair; and of course the Yellow Spring.
And there was also always Antioch College, a major proponent of civil rights activity during the 1960s, as well as the alma mater of Coretta Scott King, later wife of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Through the influence of Antioch, coupled with the commitment on the part of many of the citizens of Yellow Springs who championed the values of social justice and equality, fidelity to the idea of community has remained paramount — most importantly through the effort to build and maintain a community bound by inclusivity, where cultural, national, racial and other differences are not feared but embraced, and where these American values are meant to be celebrated by and for all.
The Yellow Springs I knew as a child may not now be exactly the same, but these values are nevertheless both its bedrock, and its legacy. Even if changed from what I experienced long ago, as a result of this essential foundation I can still find it there, as even in this new iteration it yet exists in stark contrast to the world outside its bounds, where I now live. Because of this contrast between my long history with the village and the experience of living outside it, I can say that I have never felt set apart from the community due to my African American heritage, nor that my existence aroused fear or distrust in anyone, as I have too often felt in the world outside village bounds. In the new national political framework in which we now live, the idea of community, as well as who belongs to it and who doesn’t, has taken on more narrow signification. Yet it is, nevertheless, a commitment to the kind of community that is Yellow Springs that enlivens Gov. DeWine’s words on Haitian immigrants, and that calls now to us all.
*Cyraina Johnson-Roullier is an associate professor of modern literature and literature of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame.
What's New?
Featured Photos
Recent Comments