'parent' property not being set to 'nil'

After creating a display object, its’ ‘parent’ property refers to the stage object as expected, but if I remove the display object, its’ ‘parent’ property refers to some unknown object:

I’m seeing something like:

print( display.getCurrentStage() ) -- outputs 'table:0x12345678'  
local r = display.newRect( ... )  
print( r.parent ) -- outputs 'table:0x12345678'  
display.getCurrentStage():remove( r )  
print( r.parent ) -- outputs 'table:0x048e42f1' ???  

Shouldn’t the second ‘print(r.parent)’ call be outputting ‘nil’ ? [import]uid: 1581 topic_id: 311 reply_id: 300311[/import]