When talking about the dead, as a rule of thumb, one uses the simple past because there's no possibility that the dead person or persons being talked about will do anything more in the present or future. They're gone. They once were here, but now they're not. Everything they've ever done is completely over, so the present perfect is the wrong tense. Even if you believe in ghosts, and you're talking about someone who used to be, for example, unpleasantly sarcastic when she was alive, but is now, in her postmortem spectral (ghostly) existence, kind and pleasant in speech, you'd say something like this:
Tina {was / used to be [CHOOSE ONE]} a tenaciously sarcastic termagant when she was alive, but since she has died and has become this castle's constant comely haunt, she has been as pleasantly waggish as a kitten wrestling a ball of knitting wool.
The lady talking about her late husband was talking about events in the past; therefore, they require the past tense. In storytelling, however, it's possible to talk about the past in the present tense to try to give the writing and the story a sense of immediacy (that is, that the story is occurring as the reader reads it, something like reality TV). But that's writing. It's harder to do in speech unless one is a practiced storyteller or knows only present-tense forms.
