The last graduation, the last game, the last prom. Parents, are you ready for it?

I was walking across a Target parking lot a few weeks ago when a 25-year-old memory flashed in my mind.

It was of me standing in waist-high creekwater, watching one of those late spring sunsets that occasionally remind us flatlanders that life in the Sunflower State is damn near worth the trouble.

My dad, my college roommate and I were on a sort of graduation/bachelor party. My roommate had recently graduated; I was set to get married in the next few weeks. My dad drove us out to our family’s childhood swimming hole. We call it Simon's Creek. It flows near a hog farm, which sounds gross, but it's also 100 miles upstream from Johnson County, where the same body of water is called Mill Creek.

We had been out there shirtless for a few hours, telling stories, jokes and a few lies. We nursed the last warm swallows of the beers we hauled along in an iceless cooler.

Dad was about five feet away, and my college roommate was close enough I could have punched him in the shoulder. I could just barely make out their silhouettes as the sun dipped behind the Flint Hills.

There, among the ruckus of frogs and locusts, a moment absent of human sound fell upon us. Mosquitoes swarmed. A low heat radiated from my sunburned shoulders. The occasional crawdad skittered backward across the tops of my toes, and minnows nibbled at my leg hairs.

Suddenly, Dad goes, "Yeah, someday I'll come out here and it'll be the last time."

Then he followed with, "I wonder if I'll know it."

I reckon I'm living the happily ever after. At nights, I watch sports on TV, and my wife reclines on the couch with a glass of wine in one hand and a book in the other. The wine is usually white, and the book usually concerns the murder of someone’s husband. One dog snoozes at her feet, and another snores on her lap.

We also have three real kids. The youngest, an 11-year-old boy, was with me that day at Target. Our older son graduates high school this year. Our eldest is off in search of her real life. We tried to raise her right, but she moved to St. Louis anyway.

My daughter's senior year of high school nearly killed me. My wife and I bleakly joked that it was “The Year of Lasts.” The last cross country meet. The last homecoming. The last choral concert. The last prom dress shopping trip. The night of her high school graduation I kept pacing the house, thinking, "I can’t do this."

I did, of course. Our daughter graduated, matriculated to Kansas State University and occasionally came back to visit, and not only when she needed money.

One of those visits concerned a Westport tattoo and piercing parlor, where she wanted to have some sort of rivet installed in her upper left ear. She was scared to go alone, and her mother, blaming me for this moment, made me go.

I'll be honest, I wasn’t much help. When the guy brought out the post he was going to stab into my baby girl’s ear, it staggered me. The thing looked about as long as my middle finger (it wasn’t) and as thick as a Sharpie (not even close).

When another fellow with a yard-long red beard prepared to poke the thing in her head, I felt the room go a little swirly. Then my daughter steadied the universe by reaching out her hand toward me, opening and closing it. The sound of one hand clapping? It's the universal symbol for, “Daddy, I need you.”

It’s because of that moment that I think I’m handling the whole “lasts” thing better now that my older son is about to graduate. Maybe. Maybe not.

We had the last prom a couple of weeks ago. The last basketball game a few months ago. We walked out onto the field with him on his senior soccer night with nary a tear among us. The tough one came the next week, though.

With an undefeated regular season and a trip to the state soccer championship on the line, our squad came up short, losing 4-2 (someday I’ll forgive you, Spring Hill). Attack after attack came up empty. My son missed a few shots. After the echo of the final whistle had evaporated into that heartless night, my boy trudged that long, final walk across the pitch.

He made it about three quarters of the way across before he started wiping his eyes. I walked out to meet him and he hugged the breath out of me.

“We couldn’t....," he said, sobbing in my ear. "I tried...I just couldn’t...We...I....”

His mom and I used to joke when he was little that he was the angriest baby in the world. When he cried, he gave it everything he had. He screamed when his diapers needed changed. He screamed at his sister. He screamed for “JUUUUICE!!”

But there after the first and last soccer loss of the season, there I was consoling my man-sized son. What only moments ago was just a roly poly little noise monster now was all sweat and muscle and grief and body odor. Seriously, high school soccer players smell bad.

“You did your best, kid," I told him. "I loved watching you play.”

In a few weeks he’ll graduate. Then, after a summer that his mom and I hope is spent doing something other than playing “Fortnite” on his PlayStation, he’ll be off to Kansas State. Probably to play more “Fortnite” on his PlayStation.

But anyway. Back to that trip to Target.

My wife had sent me on a run with strict instructions to buy only three things: dog food, detergent, toothpaste. My 11-year-old and I, however, quietly conspired to see what new video games were out.

Sensing our subterfuge, my wife directed, "Nothing else. I mean it."

Our youngest is our quietest, but still I attempted to get some information about his day as we loaded up and headed out.

How was school? Fine.

What was for lunch? Chicken nuggets.

What did you do for recess? Talked with friends.

Was it the best day of your life? No.

At Target, I pulled into a spot and saw a swath of the parenting life all around me.

Someone had abandoned an infant's car seat in the parking lot, apparently because a baby had pooped all over it. I watched a woman ditch her shopping cart in the lot because she'd had enough of her kids screaming at each other. I saw a daughter give a dad serious eye-roll because he told her she couldn't drive home.

I rolled up the window, opened the door, stepped out and walked around to the back.

When my son got out of the car, he walked up next to my left side. He's about shoulder-high now. In parking lots when he was younger, I’d tell him, “Hold my hand because nobody is looking out for you but me.” I still say it occasionally, but mostly I just reach my hand out toward him and he grabs it.

This time he didn’t. He just walked to the store by my side. I'm not sure I remember the last time he held my hand.

This story was originally published April 27, 2018 at 5:30 AM with the headline "The last graduation, the last game, the last prom. Parents, are you ready for it?."