Witness Protection

Who puts flowers on the graves of people in the witness protection program? The guys who ‘choose’ a new life far from their roots, in places they didn’t want to go and sometimes in cities they didn’t like. Who grieves? Who visits their graves? Does their family know they are dead and where the bodies are buried, so to speak? Do these people just disappear after they die, not unlike those that they may have made ‘disappear’ in their line of ‘work’? These guys have regular tombstones and they don’t wear concrete boots nor do they sleep with the fishes. I know this, because I know someone who was in the Witness Protection Program and I saw his gravestone. He shouldn’t have told me, but he did. And he ended up telling a lot of people — so many that the local newspaper ran a story about him after he performed a good Samaritan deed.  So I wonder……..did he die of natural causes? Or did the public disclosure make it easy for his prior ‘associates’ to locate him? Did he care? Did he get tired of the secrecy, tired of his new persona? I don’t know.  What I do know is that he just couldn’t keep it a secret. He seemed to enjoy the notoriety of having a ‘wise guys’ past. And while it didn’t make him more important in my eyes and I didn’t admire him, it certainly made him more interesting.