REJECTED: Marijana Bego with her ex, Khedouri Ezair. Their breakup, which she described in a letter (excerpts above), spurred her suicide. (
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She just couldn’t let go.
Lovesick Madison Avenue art-gallery owner Marijana Bego penned a 100-page manifesto before jumping from the building’s roof — and she called it the “most romantic story of all times.”
Bego’s note is a testament of her love for art and for business partner and boyfriend of nearly two decades Khedouri Ezair, 46 — a real-estate executive whom she never learned to stop loving, even years after they broke up.
“How she could all let it happen?” she wrote, her English broken at times, in the third-person missive mailed to niece Ivana Ristic in Serbia.
“All her life, all her endeavor for something — and what she has of it??! No husband, no kids, no savings, no health insurance, no any support.”
An impeccably dressed Bego, 54, plunged to her death on Dec. 22 from atop the Bego-Ezair Gallery — to which she dedicated years of her life.
She had been grappling with mounting financial pressures in the weeks leading up to her death, and often struggled thinking about how her life had reached such a low point.
“She took a cold, non-alcoholic O’Doulls beer by one gulp and thought how possibly she could feel and be this way now and here all by herself, all alone and almost abandoned,” she wrote, her penmanship often frantic, nearly desperate.
The final straw came a couple of months before her death, when Ezair, who managed the business’ finances, canceled her credit card and health insurance — despite Bego having broken her hand recently and needing ongoing treatment, according to her manifesto.
She tried to confront him on Oct. 18, but the conversation turned sour.
“He said to her, ‘Go away. You only spend the money. I can not stand you, either you leave my office or I’m going to leave!’ ” she wrote.
She fell further into desperation, her unrequited love for Ezair driving her to madness. “Her whole body is shaking, she could not recognize herself inside,” she wrote.
Her financial resources continued to dwindle. Pals close to Bego said she’d complain that art wasn’t selling well.
She fell into depression, despite the larger-than-life personality friends said she usually had.
After her manifesto was mailed, she jumped to her death.
Ristic found out about Bego’s death a few days later, when she received her aunt’s letter in Serbia.
“She was my support, my sun, my doll, my role model,” she told The Post via e-mail. “When I was little I wrote in my diary that I’d love to have her for mom.”
Despite Bego’s money troubles, it was the heartache of losing her greatest love that led her to “take her life away — as she felt betrayed, abandoned, left alone,” she said.
Ezair did not reply to several requests for comment.