To this day, she still cried. He was a hundred years gone and it made no difference.
The fact he'd been gone for a century was not a fact that prevented her from still being unable to get out of bed on some days.
For some reason, though, some people seemed to think it was an all-important, life-changing fact. It's been a century, after all. Surely it doesn't hurt so badly anymore. If only they knew how much she had loved him.
Seeing his eye in the mirror every day sometimes made her laugh and smile at his continuing presence, sometimes made her weep for the rest of him, and sometimes it made her do both. She never considered removing her mirrors, for then she'd see none of him anymore at all, and that just wouldn't do.
He had put up a valiant effort to remain with her in the land of the living, an effort which was rewarded with a wonderful, beautiful few centuries together. Science and magic were powerful forces when in the hands of someone with his intellect. But he had, like all living things, eventually succumbed to the most powerful force, nature, while Holly still had half her natural life left.
Before his death he had absolutely vetoed her joining him prematurely. Oh, she had wanted to. But rarely had she seen him so insistent on something, and so she had long abandoned thoughts of throwing herself from a cliff without magic.
He had also had the audacity to suggest that she might find someone else to love eventually. In response to that, she had asked him if, were their roles reversed, if he could ever do the same. That shut him up quick.
Occasionally, fairies would try their luck asking her out, the beautiful widow she was, still black-widow pretty in middle age. She always told them that no amount of luck in the world (or gold, as some suggested) could make her consider it.
"You loved him, right? Surely he'd have wanted you to be happy," suggested a particularly thick sprite one time.
"Then he wouldn't have wanted me to hook up with you, now would he?"
Her adult son, a half-human so like his father that it hurt sometimes, came to her one morning before work, with purpose. "My girls made me watch a vintage human television program last night," he said. "It had some laughably inaccurate depictions of magic, but there was a line that stuck out to me: What is grief, if not love persevering?"
Before this, she had often said things like "I loved him." Past tense! She felt like an unfaithful fool for ever saying such things.
She did not make it to work that day. LEP helmets still don't perform well when their wearers are crying.
She was grateful to her son though, because his relayed insight gave her a new way to turn away the suitors.
Even the ambitious ones rarely pursued her further once they heard "I'm sorry, but I'm already in love with another man."
She never bothered telling them that it was a dead man, for it made no difference.