Since the start of the Syrian civil war, displaced Syrians in Lebanon have adapted to not-quite-legal ways of living, dying, and moving around. The last decade has seen hyper-visible security forces scaling up along borders and border routes, and at the same time, the intensification of informal modes of mobility in and in-between the two territories. In Lebanon, strategies that rely on informality can be seen in every aspect of how Syrians navigate life, including but not limited to their camps, their pursuit of education, occupation or livelihood, and ultimately, their death and burial place. As part of the Lebanese state’s non-encampment policy, Syrians have been living in informal settlements. With no right to the land there can be no official cemeteries, setting Syrian traveling dead on the road to rent a resting place in more marginal Lebanese cemeteries, or to seek a more permanent plot in family graveyards back in Syria. In such circumstances, crossing the border to bury their dead in their hometowns involves navigating the barely visible but very real pathways shaped by political exile, illegal migration, and the informal economies that prevail in landscapes of war and displacement. In the face of economic, legal, and political hurdles, they leverage their cultural and geographic knowledge of the landscape to map out and maneuver around formal border regimes. This paper follows Syrian traveling dead from their temporary homes in Lebanon to their family graveyards in Syria as a point of departure for exploring the structures and strategies that are at play as Syrians navigate their restricted mobilities. By situating Syrians’ precarious navigation of cross-border burials in the landscape of informality, the paper proposes to move beyond the language of legal vs. illegal and instead attends to the often-grey zone of displaced persons’ movements across borders. Navigating informality has become a collective form of knowledge-production accumulated and passed on in Syrians’ everyday interactions in-person and virtually, helping them maneuver around the varying and shifting contexts of war within the authoritarian state of Syria as well as the conditions of displacement in the compartmentalized state of Lebanon. Taking into account Syrian border-crossers’ active negotiation of shifting bordering regimes helps us explore a new perspective into the ways in which sociocultural imperatives bend the ostensibly rigid bordering laws practiced on borderlines, as well as within national territorial boundaries.