October 3 2003 was an ordinary day for the Green family, but what happened that night was to make it the last ordinary day they had, and perhaps ever will have. Julie and Colin were going out to dinner: as usual Colin - a Bafta-nominated film editor - was working late, and he arrived home minutes before the couple were due to leave. "He said he wasn't feeling too good but I said he'd be fine, that he should get a move on," says Julie. "Well, what would you say if your husband came in from work saying he felt a bit under the weather?"

The evening went well, but that night in bed Colin, 47, tossed and turned. "He was grunting and groaning a lot and around 5am I said what's the matter?" says Julie. "He didn't answer so I turned on the light and he was lying sideways on the bed, looking at me but not saying anything. I said talk to me or I'll call an ambulance - I expected him to say he was only joking, that he was fine. But he didn't. So I called an ambulance."

Colin was taken to Whipps Cross hospital in east London where doctors discovered he'd suffered a stroke. "There had been no warning, nothing to alert us," says Julie. "Later they told us Colin's cholesterol level was above average, but not so bad that they could have predicted the stroke.

"And yet it happened: a clot of blood probably no bigger than a pinhead detached itself from an artery in his neck and travelled to his brain, where it caused massive damage to the left side of his brain, and so the right side of his body."

In the early days, says Julie, Colin could do hardly anything for himself: he couldn't eat, he couldn't sit up, he couldn't speak. "It was like living in a nightmare - something you'd never imagine happening. But we thought, it will be over. We'll deal with it and Colin will get better."

Today Colin is better, but he's not the man he was on October 3 2003. He wears a calliper on his right leg, but he can walk; his right hand is still badly affected, but improving slowly. He certainly looks fit and well: sit with him at his kitchen table over a cup of tea and it's easy to forget, momentarily, that he has ever been ill. But then you ask him a question and he starts to search for the answer: he looks at you and then looks around, desperately trying to put what he wants to tell you into words. The words seem to be on the tip of his tongue, but they never come. "Yes," he says eventually, emphatically. "Yes. Well. Yes."

This condition - aphasia - is, says Julie, the worst legacy of Colin's stroke. Worse than the physical disability, worse than the epileptic seizures he has been left with, worse than the draining tiredness that means he needs to sleep each afternoon. Colin's inability to speak is not because his muscles won't work or his memory has gone: it's because he has lost the ability to convert the ideas inside his head into speech. It's as though some crucial bits in the complex jigsaw puzzle that is human communication have gone missing, forcing Colin to flail around looking for them whenever he wants to take part in a conversation. In some ways, says Julie, it's as though Colin has lost the ability to speak the same language as his family and everyone around him: as though he's become a foreigner in his own kitchen.

The extraordinary thing is that even without the power of speech, there's an awful lot you can tell about Colin when you meet him. You can tell he's a warm, big-hearted guy with a great sense of humour: as Rachel, his 12-year-old daughter, says through her tears, "he's still funny, he's still really cool ..." For Rachel and her sisters - Jessica, 20, Helen, 17, and 14-year-old Maria - the past year has been a fast-track to adulthood. With their dad in hospital - he was there for eight months before coming home earlier this summer - and their mum spending a lot of time there with him, they've had to learn to look after themselves and they've had to confront the sort of difficulties associated with an infirm parent that they wouldn't have expected to have to confront for decades. And though it has been so tough - some days, says Julie, she still finds one or other of them crying somewhere alone - they've got through, and can even laugh at the funny bits.

"When dad was in hospital there were all these people coming to visit him, and then we'd go in and say, "Who's been?", and he couldn't tell us," says Jessica. "We got a visitors' book in the end. And then there was a day when we went in, before dad was eating, and there was an empty sushi packet by the bed. And we said, has someone given you sushi? Where's it gone? But of course we never did find out, because he couldn't tell us."

Colin's stroke has catapulted both him and Julie into a kind of old age long before their time: a year ago he was at the peak of his career and she was beginning to find a bit of space for herself after years raising their girls. Now life revolves around helping Colin do the simple things he can no longer manage alone and taking him for medical appointments and to a local stroke club.

Everyone who knows the Greens thinks Julie is amazing for the way she has held everything together through such a difficult time - sometimes, she admits, she has to go upstairs and have a bit of a scream on her own, but most of the time she sees the best side of everything and muddles through. Her family and friends have been fantastic - people brought suppers round for months for the girls so Julie didn't have to worry about cooking when she came home from hospital, and a huge benefit night raised £25,000 to help pay for the expenses of raising the children.

The first anniversary of Colin's stroke in a few days' time has inevitably focused the family on how far he has come since those first, awful, early days in Whipps Cross.

"He's so much better than he was," says Julie. "If it wasn't for the aphasia he could be back at work, but of course that changes things a lot." He's hoping, though, to get his editing gear moved into his garden studio soon, so he can have a go at using it again.

But Julie is worried about him doing too much, too soon: she's also worried that they don't really know the extent of the aphasia. "It's difficult to work out how much Colin can actually understand of what's being said around him.

He always gives the impression he understands, but sometimes I can tell he's pretending. It's very hard, though - how do you know how much someone is taking in if they can't communicate back with you?"

What's been crucial in keeping her sane these past 12 months, says Julie, is not allowing herself to look either backwards or forwards. There is, she says, no point. Thinking of how life used to be could be heartbreaking: looking ahead to the future, though it's rosier than it seemed a few months ago, could still be depressing and scary. So Julie forces herself to stay right here, in the present. It is, she says, the only sensible thing she can do.

Diary of a stroke

October 25 2003. Three weeks on from our bolt-from-the-blue, life-changing event - Colin's stroke. Stroke: funny word. The reality is more like a punch in the throat, or in the heart. Everything has been taken away suddenly, unexpectedly, temporarily - a great big, year (maybe) long hole in our lives . . . Colin has been taken away - but he will return. When? How?

Strength kicks in, but I am so lonely. I love him. I miss him and I can't imagine things ever being the same again.

May 26 2004. Colin is coming home this week, eight months after his life-changing event. Now we have to face the rest of our lives together. I hope it will be a long time, but we must live each day one at a time. We never imagined something like this would happen, so soon in our lives. Or even if something bad happened - because it does to many people - we never thought about losing the things we have lost. How could we have thought we would not be able to have a conversation, or talk about the kids, or that Colin would not be able to help Helen with her English A level? These things just never occurred to us . . .

June 7 2004. Colin's third day at home and I was working for a few hours. When I got back Rachel was in front of the TV and Maria in front of the computer.

"Where's Daddy?" I said. "He was here a minute ago," said Maria. I went into the garden, calling to Colin. No answer. Then I spotted him. Lying unconscious on his back, blood on his face, the sun beating down on him.

Panic came over me and I shouted for the girls to call an ambulance. Carted off again to Whipps Cross . . . it was another epileptic seizure. Colin was outside on the terrace and had fallen against the wall.

June 9 2004.

Came home from work and Colin was in the studio sorting out photos. I really wanted to talk to him about everything. I said: "I really need to talk to you but I can't." That made him cry, then me too. I said "sorry".

But I DO need to talk to him. He's the person I always talk to.

July 15 2004.

In Venice for our 25th wedding anniversary. It's been lovely but I've been anxious in case Colin has a seizure. Today we got a water taxi to San Silvestro and were going to get a bus back, but I felt quite worried. What if he had a fit? Imagine it, in the middle of Venice. We got back to the Rialto Bridge and I found another taxi. Really expensive, but I just couldn't face the bus. Too risky. Being alone together is quite scary. In this situation we are not a team any more. It's me in charge - all my responsibility.

July 17 2004.

Things have changed. Colin's spirit is the same, but his brain will never be the same again, because part of it is damaged. How we take things for granted. Reading a book - I felt guilty on the aeroplane because I was reading a book and Colin had nothing to look at. This is crazy - we've been married for 25 years and now we can't even talk to each other. OK now, my thoughts are going too far. Make the tea. Get Colin's tablets. Put one foot in front of the other . . .
Julie Green

· All About My Husband, a portrait of the Green family in the year since Colin's stroke, is on BBC2 next Tuesday at 9pm in the This is My Family series. Stroke Awareness Week runs from October 4-10. See www.stroke.org.uk. The UK charity, Connect, has recently launched the Stroke and Aphasia handbook. See www.ukconnect.org or call 020 7367 0846