ESP8266 deep sleep and MQTT
The answer for this actually goes to Juraj.  It was the fact that I was missing a delay.  In hindsight it makes sense, as even though I am competing tasks in order, the system is shutting down, before the actual message is sent.  I added a delay(1000) between the "sendMQTTMessage()" and "ESP.deepsleep()" and it worked.