Whitney Cummings on the death of her father and what it's like to hang out with wolves

After her loss, the US comedian wanted to be around beings that understood mortality and wouldn’t ask her how she was doing

‘My friends have a running joke that I was raised by wolves,’ says Cummings (Getty)

Last year my dad died. I’m not sure how I scored in terms of my weird grieving process, but let’s just say it included a lot of yelling at inanimate objects and Googling videos of baby elephants. I couldn’t remember to eat or sleep, but for some reason, I could remember that my friend Paul Scheer once told me about a wolf sanctuary he’d been to. I had instantly said I’d go, but in the kind of self-deluded way you agree to do a cleanse or sign up for an obstacle race.

My dad’s death made me realise that in terms of work, a lot of the heavy load I was taking on came with a subconscious intent to get his attention, so when he died, my need to be productive also died a little, too. Suddenly, nothing mattered, and my schedule opened up.

The sanctuary idea kept resurfacing. I wanted to be around beings that understood death, that wouldn’t ask me how I was doing, and wolves seemed like the perfect company. I had every reason not to go: I could barely get out of bed, and six months earlier, I had had my ear bitten off by a dog to the point where it hung off my head like a door-knocker earring. Though it had been artfully reattached, the idea of toothy-faced things near my head set off alarm bells.

But the death of a loved one has this amazing ability to transmogrify fear into complete numbness, sometimes even courage. My dad used to refer to himself jokingly as a lone wolf, and because of my borderline feral behaviour while eating, my friends have a running joke that I was “raised by wolves” – thematically, it all seemed to make perfect sense.

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, California, home of lots of sketchy pancake restaurants, 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 colour-corrected, but encountering a wolf in the flesh makes you realise how all those fake 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 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.

Cate explained to me what every role in the pack entails. I was especially fascinated by the way the current alpha trains the burgeoning alpha, as if it were so at peace with death that it instinctively knew to train its replacement. That was the kind of surrender I needed to navigate the grief in my chest. It also comes in handy in a business where you constantly feel as if you were being replaced by people who are younger and prettier and got famous by posting bikini pictures on Instagram.

My ego doesn’t love being wrong, so I snooped around for some information that would make me seem less incorrect about the alpha thing. I know quite a bit about dogs, and some of the rescued wolves at the sanctuary had been bred with dogs. I tried to figure out a way to manipulate the conversation to a topic I know something about. I asked, “Which ones have the highest dog content or the highest wolf content?” I could tell that she was asked this question a lot. “Do you give them blood tests to find out which are more wolf than dog?”

Cate explained that they don’t give the wolves blood tests. They focus on their behaviour. Some wolves were not raised with other wolves, so they never learnt certain behaviours, and some that looked less like them were raised with wolves and hence more wolfish. Hang out with a wolf, and you’ll become more like one.

I had just spent two years putting all my time and sweat into making The Female Brain, a film that explores how much of our behaviour is nature versus nurture, and after five minutes with wolves, it all made sense. The death of a parent tends to make you wonder if you were destined to follow in his footsteps or repeat his mistakes, but the wolves showed me that maybe the apple can fall far from the tree.

In a culture that makes me feel that I have to compete, audition, peacock, post and posture constantly, observing the effortless functionality of the wolf pack pushed “pause” on those impulses. The alpha wolf showed me that when I’m feeling as if I need to work more, make more, fight more or tweet more, maybe the best thing I can do for myself and everyone around me is to go take a nap.

© New York Times