1) We need to lock and get a strong ref to the parent, if still there.
2) If it has gone away, we need to handle that gracefully.

This is necessary in order to safely modify a running pipeline. Has been
observed when a streaming thread is doing a buffer_alloc() while an
application thread sends an event on a pad further downstream, and from
within a pad probe (holding STREAM_LOCK) carries out the pipeline plumbing
while the streaming thread has its buffer_alloc() in progress.