In Spite of Everything is an ongoing investigation into the lives and bodies of the women in my family, moving from mythic ancestor to mother to myself. Through archival family photographs, embroidery, botanical diagrams, and gestures of incision and repair, I examine how mortality lives inside domestic space and how the female body becomes both archive and specimen. Botanical textbook diagrams enter the work as parallel language. Plant hormones regulate growth, stress, and senescence. Roots and vascular systems mirror veins. By placing biological systems beside family photographs, I question whether mortality is personal or structural; is it rupture, or is it pattern? Across many cultural and mythological frameworks, the feminine is understood as a generative and cyclical force, often associated with the earth, the body, and the rhythms of the moon. Within these traditions, women are not positioned within a linear narrative of youth, decline, and death, but within cycles of transformation, renewal, and return. This perspective offers a way of understanding birth, illness, aging, and death as interconnected phases rather than isolated events. Through this lens, the women in my family are not singular figures defined by tragedy, but participants in ongoing processes of creation, endurance, and continuity. In Spite of Everything considers how women endure within systems that expose them to risk, expectation, illness, and silence. It asks what persists in the body despite harm. It asks how memory is held in flesh. It asks how we inherit not only genes, but stories. Part of my inheritance is in how I reclaim and retell these stories.