DES MOINES – When they met for the first time, then-President Bill Clinton said he didn’t know quite what to think of Dr. Stephen Gleason.

The Des Moines doctor was unique, Clinton said, a ball of continuous motion with an impressive intellect and an infectious enthusiasm.

It was a combination to which the president quickly warmed.

“We just loved the guy,” he said.

Clinton implored hundreds of people gathered at St. Augstin Church for his friend and former health adviser’s funeral Thursday to remember him this way – for the generous and energetic man that he was – rather than for the way Gleason’s life ended.

Gleason, 59, who also served as Gov. Tom Vilsack’s chief of staff and as Iowa’s commissioner of public health, died Saturday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He had battled addiction and depression, recently admitting in an interview that he had relapsed in a battle with prescription pain killers.

But Clinton and other friends and former colleagues of Gleason said they would remember him not for his struggles, but for the many characteristics that made him stand out: His ear-to-ear grin, his optimism and a laugh one friend described as “volcanic.”

Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Jay Rockefeller, D-W. Va., and Clinton were among the political luminaries who served as honorary pallbearers.

Vilsack remembered a former chief of staff who loved to eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Boston Baked Beans and had the diligence and work ethic to chase the governor down in an airport with his “computer parts going everywhere.”

Everyone who spoke touched on Gleason’s generosity, a trait his friends and family said permeated whatever task or job on which he was working.

Msgr. Frank Bognanno, a Des Moines Roman Catholic priest, remembered a time when a family with no health insurance came to a hospital in which Gleason was working with their young daughter, who kept banging her head.

The couple wanted to leave – they were sure their daughter was fine – but Gleason insisted he check it out.

He discovered a tumor and arranged to have it removed and, Bognanno said, the young girl is still alive today.

Clinton speculated that Gleason’s generosity toward other people ultimately may have come back to cost him.

“Sometimes, when people give so much, they don’t keep enough for themselves,” he said.