A couple of days after the funeral, I asked two of my most tolerant, patient friends — my college bestie, Niki, and my comedian pal Kevin to accompany me to Palmdale, Calif., home of lots of sketchy IHOPs, a tremendous amount of asphalt and the Wolf Connection sanctuary. The night before, I went into a wormhole of wolf photos for inspiration, but nothing prepares you for seeing a real one, much less touching one. So much of what we look at now is airbrushed, laced with a complimentary filter and color-corrected, but encountering a wolf in the flesh makes you realize how all those ersatz finishes, meant to improve the image, actually kind of ruins it. In the quest to make things flawless and beautiful, we remove the grit and spirit, the qualities that actually make them interesting. It was breathtaking to see wolves free of pixels, without a comments section, or being reduced to “likes.”

I assumed I’d be watching the wolves from 20 feet away, squinting through glass and chain-link fences, desperately trying to get a selfie. No, no. At Wolf Connection, you go right into the enclosures with the animals. I was surprised that their hair was so coarse, that their musty smell was actually calming, and that I did not wet my pants.

Each wolf was doing something different. One was digging, one was pacing, one was howling, one was eating, one was grooming itself, one was sleeping, one was hiding, one was hanging out in its den, one was digging on top of its den and one was intently and seemingly menacingly staring at us.

Cate Salansky, our wolf expert and guide, asked me, “Which one do you think is the alpha?”

Duh, I thought. This woman really took me for an idiot. “The one who’s howling,” I said. “That’s obviously the leader.”

“Nope.”

All right, I thought, then it must be the one that is eating.

Wrong again.

I went on to guess every wolf except the alpha. Turns out, the alpha wolf can usually be found sleeping. Sleeping. Didn’t it need to bark and growl and intimidate people to show everyone that it was the alpha? No; overcompensating is more of a people thing. Ages ago, I read somewhere, probably in a self-help book I bought after a nasty breakup, that truly powerful beings don’t need to prove how powerful they are. This made no sense to me until I saw it in action with the wolves. When you’re truly in control, you don’t need to tap on people’s shoulders constantly to remind them how in control you are.