Nursing homes as care institutions seek to offer a home where people can live until their death. A potential conflict, therefore, exists as nursing homes are both a place where life is lived and where death is regularly encountered. It has been proposed that within residential care homes for older people, dying individuals are separated from living people. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in four English nursing homes the management of the dying process and the relationship between life and death is explored. There is much uncertainty inherent in the boundary between life and death for many residents in nursing homes. The relationship between life and death for these residents is less about the sequestration of dying people from living people, but rather the creation of transitional states between these two polarities.