This chapter explores the meanings of death among East Timorese who are living in Indonesian West Timor. Scholars focusing on the socio-political life of East Timorese society have given different explanations of how East Timorese treat and attribute meanings to death. They have pointed out how death involves obligations of social network that extend beyond kinship boundaries (Bovensiepen 2018); that death is essentially part of the life cycle that functions to reaffirm social relations (Bovensiepen 2014); that the dead possess a power to influence the lives of the living (Viegas 2019; Grenfell 2012, 2015; McWilliam 2008, 2011; Bovensiepen 2009; Hicks 2004; Traube 1986); and that the still-living can manipulate the dead for numerous social and political outcomes (Kent and Feijó in this volume).

While all of these approaches capture the complex arrangements and multiple meanings of death in the lives of East Timorese in Timor-Leste, this chapter advances an argument for the potency of death in the lives of East Timorese in Indonesian West Timor. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in West Timor between October 2012 and October 2013 and my subsequent intermittent visits to West Timor and Timor-Leste between January 2017 and May 2019, I will focus my analysis on death and transnational relationships, because increasingly East Timorese in West Timor are opting to transfer the deceased across the border to be buried in their home villages.