Lillian Metz

Lillian "Nanny" Metz, 94

Real Estate mogul until the day she drew her last breath Lillian "Nanny" Metz, 94, died September 12, 2013 at her home on the lake in Orlando, Florida.

Lillian was born on March 20, 1919 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Peter and Katherine Kowey.

Lillian grew up a child in the Great Depression to a very poor immigrant family from Lebanon and dreamed of a better life.

After marrying Joseph Metz and having two daughters, they moved the family to Miami, Florida wherein they opened a nightclub. Having enough of those long houred days and wanting a different kind of life for their family, they took their children, packed their belongings in their boat and moved to Orlando, Florida wherein they opened their own Real Estate and Building Company in 1960. They lived and worked side by side for 52 years before he left this world and then she took on the business along side her two daughters, JoAnn Lorne and Rosemary Bailey, teaching them everything they needed to know to take over the business when she retired. However, there was no way of knowing she would still be running the business the week before she drew her last breath.

Lillian was a strong, fiercely independent woman who prided herself in building an empire for her family that will last one generation after another until the day the world stops turning.

Lillian left this world with the same grace and dignity in which she lived her entire life. She is survived by her sister Marion, her daughter and son-in-law JoAnn and John Lorne, Pappy Wayne; her grandchildren and their spouses/significant others Kathi, Johnny and Jill, Eddie and Angel, Jodi and Ricky, Mee-Mee and Erik, Tami and Michelle, Heidi and Mikey, Ashley and Timmy, Tammy, and Teddy; great-grandchildren Sarah, Jonathan, John, Makayla, Justin, Sobee, Tyler, Anthony, Alyssa, Joseph, Jay, EJ, Cheyenne, and Liam; great-great grandchildren Kaiden, and Kaden.

Lillian was preceded in death by her husband Joseph, her newborn child Joey, and her daughter Rosemary.

Per Lillian's wishes there will be a private mass held in her home with the family, but no other services will be held.

Nanny we will all miss our weekly dinners, shopping trips, shared weekends, and Sunday dinners; but especially the family holiday adventures: Ringing in every New Years together and singing of Old Lang Syne with made up words, egg hunts at Easter, Memorial and Labor Day barbeques, Fireworks on Independence Day, trick or treating and costumes on Halloween, Huge Thanksgiving dinners with enough food to feed an army, and Christmas Eve Parties and Christmas dinners with the traditional pot of soup and family rosary, not to mention the every year birthday parties, anniversaries, graduations, and weddings that marked the growing of the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren. We are so blessed to have had you as long as we did but even those of us who have had the multiple decades of knowing you it just was not enough. We suspect even if we had another 50 years that wouldn't be enough time either, we would still wish one more day with you, one more hour, one more minute, one more second.

You will always be our hero and our inspiration, someone that we looked up to, and someone we will always strive to be like. You are already greatly missed and you only left this world a few days ago. We are going to find ourselves missing you most in our normal weekly routine days of seeing you and it will take a long time for us to be able to find something else to do during those days and times. We will all carry a piece of you with us and know that we are blessed to have another beautiful angel to watch over and guide us.

Most of all we want to thank you for all the memories of the shared traditions that define our family memories that will keep us bound together and keep you alive in our hearts forever.