A Toraja death is not treated as complete at the moment breathing stops. Until the family can gather the resources a proper funeral requires, chiefly water buffalo for sacrifice, the deceased is spoken of as someone who is sick, and is kept within the household, tended and addressed much as a living relative would be, sometimes for months and occasionally for years, until Rambu Solo, the full funeral ceremony, can finally be staged. Only after Rambu Solo is completed, with its days of ritual, feasting and buffalo sacrifice witnessed by the wider community, is the person considered to have actually died and to have begun the journey to Puya, the Toraja land of souls.
A related practice, Ma'nene, periodically exhumes already buried relatives, some years or decades dead, to clean and redress the remains before reburial, an act of ongoing care for ancestors framed as maintaining rather than disturbing the relationship between the living and the dead. Both practices have drawn sustained tourist and journalistic attention to Tana Toraja since the late twentieth century, a visibility that has itself become a subject of Indonesian scholarship on how a religious practice changes when it also becomes something outsiders travel to watch.