How to deal with people who misrepresent my intentions?

Recently I had to deal with a few family members who thought I was acting selfish for wanting to fly back home sooner after majority of the funeral rituals were completed for my grandma. I was already very stressed out with work and needed fly to attend a funeral for my grandma all of a sudden with my family. Because the schedule was hinging upon her condition, it wasn’t properly set and communicated with me because we didn’t know how long she’ll be alive and initially thought she could make it. I waited a few days after the cremation was done to request leaving but being the younger person, the elders talked abusively and scolded me for not staying all the way through. The last ritual was going to happen on the 9th day or so after her passing, so we needed to sit tight until then. After explaining my work situation which was a bit unique compared to others, they still seemed to not fully understand and thought I could be productive with just my work laptop like the other even though my work is more complex and requires a second monitor. Right after returning, I have be my team’s on-call which makes my work schedule a bit more hectic because I can be paged at any time for that entire week. I already pushed my shift for it 1 week out. I would be pretty jet lagged and would have to work twice as hard that week.

The more I kept trying to explain it, the more they kept looking at me like I didn’t care about the funeral because nobody was emotionally available at that time to care to listen and fully understand either. However, my mom later confirmed with me that we would return Friday evening and we’d have enough time to rest before the work week which should help with jet lag so that slightly calmed my nerves and I decided to ultimately stay even if it put me in an uncomfortable position. Despite staying the damage was already done since everyone now thinks I didn’t want to be there out of my own desire. My mom knew my situation better than everyone because she saw it first hand for the past year and was supportive of me leaving, but everyone else that barely understood my situation and over-simplified my circumstances made me look like I was wrong for doing that. I ended up having apologize and said I could have handled it better (only because hindsight is 20/20) even though I still strongly believed I had valid reasons to leave. Now if they ever feel jealous or want to ruin my reputation for whatever reason, they can simply go around telling people an oversimplified and biased narrative that I didn’t care about the funeral and wanted to leave prematurely. Nobody’s currently treating me abusively because of it but my fear is they can falsely weaponize this incident against me, especially my older brother who acted passive aggressive with me for 2-3 months straight after we came back and practically forced me to apologize to get him to stop behaving that way. He has a history of talking about me behind my back.