This column is the latest in a series on parenting children in the final years of high school, “Emptying the Nest.” Read the previous installment, about last first day of school, here .

My third and youngest child is about to graduate high school and I am thrilled. If I have done nothing else in this crazy life, I have helped hoist three marvelous kids to legal adulthood and sent them all off to college.

For the last 12 months, I’ve been crawling to the finish line — why is filling out the FAFSA form always such a nightmare? — and here it is, shining before me! A world with no AP classes, basketball fundraisers or backpacks disgorging papers that I should have signed last week.

I’ve been dutifully chronicling all the various “lasts,” hers and ours — last college application, las

See Full Page