Figured it out my mistake.  I was trying to print the grad not of the entire tensor.  variableName in the original post was actually variableName[index1][index2][index3] where variableName is a dict, variableName[index1] is a tensor, and index2 and index3 are going to specific rows and columns.  Looks like grad only gets printed for the main tensor.  Other people looking at this might be able to confirm they made the same mistake if they see grad_fn = SelectBackward, which doesnt show up when printing the full tensor.