Obituary
In the care of Solemn OaksTyler Grams, 22, of Grant, died Saturday, July 11, 2026, in a car accident, on a summer night, with most of his life still folded up and waiting in front of him. He was a welding student and a volunteer firefighter cadet, and everyone who knew him tells the same thing first: that he could not wait — to weld, to ride the truck, to be of use — and that the waiting was the only thing he was ever bad at.
Tyler was born June 6, 2004, in Grant, the middle of Dennis and Michelle Grams's three kids, a busy-handed boy who was happiest building something or taking it apart to see how it went together. He found welding at the county career center in high school, and it fit him like nothing had before. He went on to the community college for it, and he was good — good enough that his instructor let him help the first-years, good enough to have real plans. He loved that he could take two pieces of steel and a torch and make them one thing, stronger at the seam than anywhere else. He'd hold up a clean bead the way other people hold up a fish.
The other half of him wanted to run toward the fire. He'd wanted to be a Grant firefighter since he was a little kid at the department's pancake breakfast, and the summer he turned eighteen he signed on as a cadet. He washed the trucks and coiled the hose and studied the manuals and showed up — to every training, every drill, every call he was cleared to ride along on — with a seriousness that made the older guys grin and then, quietly, hope. He was going to be one of the ones who run in. Anybody could see it.
He was easy to love and impossible to keep still. He drove a rusted-out Ranger he was forever fixing and forever proud of, kept a good old bird dog named Scout, could eat more than physics should allow, and was first to help a buddy move or a neighbor stack wood. He was gentle with little kids, patient with old people, and unfailingly kind to the ones who didn't have many people in their corner. He was twenty-two, and he was already, unmistakably, a good man.
His family asks that you not dwell on the road, or the night, or the arithmetic of everything he didn't get to do. Dwell instead on the boy at the pancake breakfast who couldn't wait to grow up and be of use. He grew up. He was of use. Nobody who knew him will forget how badly he wanted to help — or doubt, for a second, the man he was going to be.
He is survived by his parents, Dennis and Michelle Grams of Grant; his older sister, Megan, and his younger brother, Jack; his grandparents, Roger and Judy Grams and Linda Voss; his dog, Scout; his girlfriend, Hannah Priebe; his welding classmates; and the whole of the Grant Fire Department, who had already begun calling him one of their own.
He was preceded in death by his grandfather, Earl Voss, a thirty-year volunteer firefighter, whose old department pager Tyler kept on his dresser.