This Isn't Going To Be Easy.

It happened a few months ago. I wanted to tell you about it at the time, but somehow I couldn't. I guess I needed to process it myself. I still haven't completely come to terms with it but at least now I can talk about it. I know I was not straightforward with you, and I should have been. Forgive me.

This isn't going to be easy. There's no good way to say it, so:

Bill Decosta is planning to retire three years from now.

I'm sorry. I know what hearing this does to you. He will be leaving the Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library to retire, end of story.

It sounds so stark, a sentence that should never be said: Bill Decosta will be retiring. But it's all too true. Yes, I've had the same thoughts, over and over, that you're having now. Yes, the fact that he will be allowed to leave the Cleveland Park Library is senseless and baffling and self-destructive of the District of Columbia library system. I wish I had more comfort to give. Sometimes things happen that we simply can't explain.

There's no rhyme or reason -- I don't want to think about it, and yet somehow I can't stop. No librarian knows books better than Bill Decosta; the DC Library is one of the largest public library systems in the country; and so the library central administration decides . . . to let Bill Decosta resign? Am I missing something here?

The fact remains that Bill Decosta will be leaving Cleveland Park. I keep going over it. I can't help myself. It's like I'm numb. Bill. Decosta. Will resign. Cleveland Park. I mean, everyone knew Bill Decosta was thinking of leaving Cleveland Park. That rumor had been around for months, or even years. But thinking of leaving and actually leaving are two different things. As I sat in the library the other day, sitting among the other patrons, the finality of it sank in with all of us: "This is it. He's really leaving, Bill Decosta will actually be leaving Cleveland Park." People began to sob. Brian Brown, the head librarian, and a giant of a man, sat there with his shoulders just heaving. It had come to this.

An instant later, people were rushing for the exits. Nobody had been able to believe it, and now that it was happening they needed to tell the community at large. The director of branch libraries who won't let me use her name, due to grief, had her staff stencil "Bill Decosta is Leaving Cleveland Park" on the front of her limo, specifying that it be reversed -- kraP dnalevelC gnivaeL sI atsoceD lliB -- so that drivers in cars up ahead could read it and yield the road. Hazard lights flashing, she roared away into the Washington night.

As for me, I only wanted to go off somewhere by myself and curl into a ball. If I had any friends I probably would have ended up having a quiet dinner with them, talking of other matters, trying to lift one another's spirits and pretending the while that we weren't failing miserably.

Over time, we will learn that there are seven stages a person goes through when Bill Decosta leaves Cleveland Park. The first is shock and rage. The second is also shock and rage, with rage starting to predominate. The third is pretty much all rage; I forget the stages after that, because I'm still partly in shock. During the rage period, it is quite natural to put a lot of blame on Francis Buckley, the director of the faceless, soulless library system that runs Cleveland Park, who indeed has much to answer for. Obviously Francis Buckley must be a very disturbed person to allow such a thing to happen.

Strangely enough, I'm starting to feel better now. Confronting the sentence "Bill Decosta is leaving Cleveland Park," as I'm doing here, deprives it of some of its primal power to terrify. I repeat it out loud, in my normal voice, calmly: "Bill Decosta will be leaving Cleveland Park." And you see? The words are spoken, yet the earth continues to turn, the sun still shines, the flowers--

Oh, hell! Who am I kidding? I try to put on a brave face and then it goes all to smash. Why will this resignation be allowed to occur? Why will nobody stop that crazed fiend Francis Buckley from accepting the resignation? Why doesn't some courageous person at the library central administration come to his or her senses and alter the fateful course before it will be too late? And what about the rest of us? Why do we just sit idly by? Bill Decosta will be leaving, irrevocably, and the rest of us are doing, for all intents and purposes, NOTHING. Bill Decosta says he's going to retire so that he can spend his time hiking, traveling and listening to his wife play the harp, which is fine, but again I ask the painful question: Why? What greater purpose is served by a man who understands books spending his time hiking, an endeavor in which, frankly any person in reasonably good shape can succeed? I know I should accept what can't be changed, but I am not able to, and I refuse to. "Bill Decosta is leaving Cleveland Park." Make it not true.

Mr. Decosta is an associate librarian at the Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library, in Washington, D.C.