This paper examines the condition of legal death experienced by a Syrian community originally from al-Qusayr and its Rif and displaced in a camp in Akkar, Northern Lebanon. Forged by the combination of political violence and warfare bureaucracy in contemporary Syria, the category of legal death defines a non-legal condition that lies ambiguously between illegality in Lebanon and statelessness in Syria. Legal death originates in the camp dwellers’ loss of Syrian official documents during their expulsion from their homes as the result of the military campaign raged by Hezbollah and the al-Assad regime forces in 2013 and their journey of death [rihlat al-mawt] to Lebanon across unofficial borders. The paper traces how this legal condition is reproduced in displacement through the impossibility of retrieving Syrian official documents due to the reconfiguration of the Syrian bureaucratic apparatus in times of war. While retrieving official papers from Syria through the formal face of the state becomes a political act, obtaining these documents through its informal face requires economic and social capital that Qusayris ‘lost’ in the journey of death. As physical violence morphs into bureaucratic violence and travels across the Syrian-Lebanese border, I argue that Qusayris’ legal death exceeds the dichotomy between legality/non-legality and citizenship/statelessness. Indeed, legal death is also symptomatic of a more intimate and ‘sentimental’ loss tied to the significance of these official papers that encompasses different temporalities – past, present and even future. The paper follows the vicissitudes of Qusayris in their quest for a documented form of life and records of family history through the creation of new non-legal and semi-legal material artefacts. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2014 and 2015, I capture two distinctive dynamics at work in the way Qusayris engage with this loss. While affective and material labour characterised the creation of an archive of civilian records within the perimeters of the camp, the community also forged new social relationships with Lebanese religious authorities to obtain semi-legal marriage, birth and death certificates. In the midst of legal death, these mundane papers become the infrastructure supporting (non-)legal personhood.