Tldr at bottom.
I mentioned this in a comment and people seemed interested so I thought I’d give it its own post.
This happened a number of years ago, I was working retail for one of the biggest supermarkets around. My grandmother was late stages of dementia, and we were told to expect the worst to happen in the next few hours. So I called in to work that morning and said I was going to take time off that day to go and spend time with her.
If I was ever going to call in sick, I’d make sure I did it before this manager started work, as he wouldn’t take no for an answer. I once got a hernia from work and he flat out refused to let me go to the hospital. Suggesting a glass of water and a 5 minute break would fix my issue.
Anyway, so I called in and spoke to a manager and they said it was fine. I thought nothing of it, went off with my family to see her. Queue the next few hours, my phone was blowing up with calls, texts and voicemails, saying how selfish I was to go visit her and leave people at work doing my job for me. He knew why I was off, but somehow that made me the selfish one. I expect his actual issue was being made to do work he thought was below him (all he usually did was stand around and have a go at people for not working fast enough or spending too long in the toilet.
When I was in the next day he was trying to be friendly with me, he had a real bipolar attitude towards everybody below him. At the end of the day he was talking to another manager when I walked past. He looked at me and said in a joking way ‘you’d better not take any time off to see your grandma, what sort of an excuse is that’, and started laughing with the other manager, following it up with ‘hopefully you won’t have to go see her again’.
She didn’t die on that day, and I reduced my hours to one day a week shortly after that. But every shift I started there I hoped that manager would leave me alone.
Sorry for this long post, it turned in to a rant!
Tldr: my boss laughed at me for visiting my dying grandma after texting/calling me the whole time I was there calling me selfish. When returning he laughed at me and said ‘at least you won’t have to take time away from here to visit her now’ thinking she had died.