True holiday spirit

Seven-year-old Julio Urquiza ran outside his mother’s trailer Friday afternoon in Newport Beach in his socks when he saw the minivan filled with presents pull up outside.

His favorite part of Christmas?

“Opening presents,” he said without hesitation.

It’s been a hard year for the Julio and his family. This is the first Christmas Julio will spend without his father, Miguel Urquiza, who died of Lou Gehrig’s Disease in July. The progressive disease of the nerve cells causes muscles to weaken and atrophy.

“Julio looks up in the sky, and he sees clouds and says, ‘My daddy is drawing a dinosaur for me, my daddy is drawing me a picture,’” said Julio’s mother, Leonila Urquiza.

Leonila Urquiza had to quit her job to take care of her husband as his illness progressed.

Assistance League of Newport-Mesa members have unofficially adopted the Urquiza family and pay their rent. Volunteers dropped off a van load of groceries and Christmas presents Friday for Julio and his brother, Omar, 17.

After Christmas, the family will fly to Mazatlán to lay Miguel Urquiza’s ashes to rest in a church there. Assistance League members and other donors pitched in to pay for the trip.

“They were my angels,” Leonila Urquiza said.

It was Miguel Urquiza’s dying wish to be cremated and the ashes placed in a church in his wife’s home town. When Leonila Urquiza dies, their ashes will be mixed together. The couple would have been married 25 years Dec. 31.

“He wanted to be where I am,” Leonila Urquiza said.

Assistance League members have provided dental care for the Urquiza children for about 15 years through its Children’s Dental Health Center program. Volunteers wanted to do more when they found out about Miguel Urquiza’s father.

“There’s probably 5,000 families just like them,” said Assistance League member Marie-France Lefebvre, who helped coordinate donations for Urquiza family. “But you just take it one family at a time.”

The Assistance League runs a dental clinic for children, some community outreach programs and offers a few other nonprofit services, but the kind of help the Urquiza family needed was beyond the scope of what the group could offer. Members reached out anyway and adopted the family, creating a fund to pay the family’s rent and help with other expenses.

Lefebvre sent one e-mail to her daughter about the Urquiza family, and everything else fell into place.

“Within a day, people were offering all sorts of help,” Lefebvre said.

When Terry Landers, owner of Salon L in Newport Beach, heard about the Urquiza family he recruited his staff, customers and friends to gather donations of food, clothing, gift cards and toys for the family.

Landers’ 10-year-old son purchased some of the gifts for Julio, including a toy truck, with his own money.

“That was better than any present,” Landers said.

BRIANNA BAILEY may be reached at (714) 966-4625 or at [email protected].