COPING WITH SUICIDE WOODLAND HILLS WOMAN USED WRITING AND ART TO DEAL WITH HER HUSBAND'S DEATH.

Byline: JOHAN MENGESHA Valley News Writer

On a December afternoon in 1971, Sara Shai was preparing herself for a romantic night out with her husband, Moshe. He was going to take her to the ballet, but first he said he needed some quiet time by himself in their Tel Aviv home.

She did not think much of it and left for an hour. She returned home to find the police outside. There would be no ballet that night.

Her husband, a 31-year-old successful Israeli journalist, had committed suicide while she was gone.

He had called the taxi company the couple frequently used and asked for the driver to come upstairs to help him carry some luggage because he did not want his wife to be the one who found him. It was all planned.

``It was a surprise and, at the same time, not a surprise,'' said the 60-year-old Woodland Hills resident about her husband's suicide.

He had been happy during the two weeks prior to the suicide and promised Shai a second honeymoon, she said. Instead he took his own life and left his wife with a lot of anger, grief and questions. She could not understand why he did it or how he felt.

Shai was only 24 years old when her husband shot himself. The following year, she decided to move to Los Angeles to get a clean start in life. There were too many things reminding her of him in Tel Aviv.

She still has trouble saying his name to this day. In her memoir, ``Beautiful in Black, Conversations with Suicide,'' she uses the name Dan Tavor for him.

The book has been a 35-year project and has been rewritten several times before being published this year. Writing, along with painting and sculpting, was a way for Shai to deal with her sorrow.

``Writing and my art were my healing tools,'' Shai said. ``It was such a meditative state. It was communication without words.''

The reason it took her so long to finish the book was because it was a difficult process trying to understand why her husband wanted to take his own life. Shai, who worked as a freelance journalist and Hebrew teacher in Israel, also did extensive research about suicide and why people do it.

``Writing a book like this, you really have to go into your past and dissect every minute and every event and it is pretty hard and emotional,'' she said.

She thought the book would help a lot of people who went through what she experienced and she used that as her motivation to finish it.

What can be hard for people who were close to someone who committed suicide is to talk about it, because many people think it's not acceptable to discuss it, Shai said.

The same goes for people contemplating suicide.

``It's an unhealthy, unbalanced mental state,'' she said. ``They nurse the idea of suicide.''

It was not until about 10 years ago that she was able to forgive her late husband. She was at a point in her life where she felt she had hit rock bottom, after she discovered that a boyfriend she had was dating another woman.

``The pain was so unbelievable that for a split moment I thought about suicide,'' Shai said. ``When I thought about suicide, I stepped into (Moshe's) shoes and I felt his pain. When I felt his pain I was really able to release and forgive him.''

The next day she bought a ticket to Israel and went to visit his grave.

``Beautiful in Black, Conversations with Suicide'' is available at bookstores and at amazon.com.

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Photo:

(color) Author and artist Sara Shai holds up the original draft of her book ``Beautiful in Black, Conversations with Suicide,'' which she started 35 years ago. A copy of the book sits in front of a self-portrait she painted for the book's cover.

Johan Mengesha/Valley News