Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” The contributors to Eulogies II seem to be saying, “All the world’s a cellar, and one only need pull open the bulkhead doors to catch a whiff of the stench, or to walk down the damp, crumbling concrete steps to brave an encounter with what creeps, crawls, or festers in the darkness.” In most cultures, hell is known as a place underneath, down below, in the dark where it is either unbearably hot or unbearably cold, where terrible circumstances overwhelm or even destroy those who wander there. Hell is the ultimate cellar. So it’s no wonder the idea of going down stirs up such a sense of dread. And our life experience is filled with cellars. Cellars of place. Cellars of time. Cellars of circumstance. They can all hold dark, horrifying, and unseemly secrets.From the Introduction by Elizabeth Massie