Bette Reilly loved golf, singing in the car, crying while watching movies and connecting with people on social media. She loved helping others and she loved making people laugh and she loved everyone even if she didn’t like them, according to friends and relatives.
“She loved really, really hard,” her cousin, Teresa Esposito, said.
Reilly also loved her job at Pleasant Hill Driving Range in Scarborough.
“That place was her little slice of heaven,” her brother, Nate Walsh, said.
Reilly went missing Sunday while looking for golf balls in a pond at Pleasant Hill Driving Range, and her body was found a few hours later in 9 feet of water. Reilly — who lived in Westbrook — was pronounced dead at the scene, but the cause of her death has not yet been determined.
Reilly, 47, grew up in southern Maine, and her childhood was all about family, Esposito said.
Esposito was Reilly’s first cousin, but she said they felt more like sisters.
Their family is so big that they’d see people at family reunions they didn’t realize they were related to, and sometimes there would be more than 30 family members celebrating together on Christmas Eve.
But Reilly was especially close with her first cousins, aunts and uncles.
She lived with Esposito while she attended the former Catherine McAuley High School in Portland, where they played basketball together.
They always drove to school and basketball practice together — Reilly at the wheel and Esposito putting in the different CDs: Rusted Root, Counting Crows, Sarah McLachlan. Esposito’s fondest memories are of the two of them, singing and laughing at the top of their lungs the whole way to school.
Reilly was Esposito’s protector. If anyone bothered her, they had to answer to Reilly.
She had a soft soul, she was fiercely loyal and she could always make you laugh, Esposito said.
While they may have lost touch as they grew older, Esposito idolized Reilly, and she looked up to her all throughout their childhood.
Walsh has too many wonderful memories of his sister Reilly to process. She brought life to every situation she was in, he said.
“There didn’t even have to be words. Sometimes we’d just look at each other and start laughing uncontrollably,” Walsh said. “That’s the connection we had.”
He loved just sitting and talking with her. When he came back from the military, she was the only one with whom it felt like no time had passed.
“She was the light in my soul,” Walsh said. “Somebody who turned the worst days good.”