Private donations are an important source of funding for medical research and patient care, yet little is known about how personal experiences shape these contributions. We provide the first population-level causal evidence on how exposure to severe illness affects private provision of public goods. Using Swedish administrative data linking individual donations to health and medical records, we exploit variation in cancer diagnosis timing within a difference-in-differences framework to examine how such shocks affect charitable giving among patients and their families. Event-study estimates show that both personal illness and relatives' diagnoses substantially increase donations to cancer charities, with effects persisting for at least three years. The responses are highly cause-specific: giving to cancer charities rises while donations to other domains decline or remain unchanged, reflecting both a reallocation and an overall expansion in giving. The findings indicate that personal experiences can reshape the composition and level of private contributions to public goods. Effects are strongest among immediate family members and decline with kin distance. When a family member dies from cancer, the effect is roughly five times larger than that of a diagnosis, highlighting the importance of grief and emotional proximity on giving. Sweden's universal healthcare system minimizes financial confounding, suggesting that the observed behavioral responses are primarily driven by suffering, grief, and mortality salience rather than financial need