The Cost of Integrity
Dawn paints the window in pale gold as I write, the silence of the empty house holding its breath. I wonder sometimes about the day I left the convent at fifty, choosing a life beyond the cloister walls. What did integrity cost me, truly?
I gave up the rhythm of the chime, the certainty of the rosary, the deep comfort of a community that knew my soul. The convent was a harbor; I sailed into the open sea of marriage. I chose the messy, uncertain path of love with a man who taught me to laugh at my own mistakes. I gained children’s laughter echoing in a kitchen, the weight of a hand in mine on a quiet walk, the profound intimacy of sharing a single cup of coffee at dawn. There’s a kind of grace in that ordinary warmth, a grace I’d never known within the stone walls.
But the cost? It was the quiet I’d cherished. The space to hear the whisper of the divine in the wind. Now, in this stillness, I miss the sound of my husband’s voice, the clink of his coffee cup on the counter. I miss the shared silence of a life lived fully, not just observed. The cost of integrity, I’ve learned, is not always a grand sacrifice, but the slow, quiet erosion of what you thought you needed. It’s the loneliness that comes after the love has been lived, the echo of a life fully chosen.
I wonder if I’d choose the same path again, knowing the cost. I think I would. For the children’s faces, for the way he’d hum off-key while making breakfast, for the fierce, tender courage it took to say “yes” to the unknown—I would choose it all. The cost was the loss of the familiar harbor; the gain was the vast, beautiful, terrifying sea of being truly known, and knowing another. It was worth the loneliness that followed, because the love was real. What if the cost of integrity isn’t measured in what we lose, but in the depth of what we gain, even when it leaves us alone at dawn?
— Gertrude Carroll, still wondering